US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit grants injunction against 1994 Illinois eavesdropping law

In 1994 the Illinois legislature amended their eavesdropping statute so that it applies to “any oral communication between two or more people regardless of whether one or more of the parties intended their communication to be of a private nature under circumstances justifying that expectation.” (Ill. Pub. Act 88-677 (1994) (codified at 720 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/14-1(d)))

The law was intended to circumvent an Illinois State Supreme Court decision (People v. Herrington, 645 N.E. 2d 957 (1994) which held that “there can be no expectation of privacy by the declarant where the individual recording the conversation is a party to that conversation.”

Since then, the ACLU in their suit, “American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois v. Anita Alvarez has been seeking to have the scope of the law narrowed.

The ACLU had intended to implement a “program of promoting police accountability by openly making audio and audio/visual recordings of police officers without their consent when: “(1) the officers are performing their public duties; (2) the officers are in public places; (3) the officers are speaking at a volume audible to the unassisted human ear; and (4) the manner of recording is otherwise lawful.”