Chicago Police Officer John Bartholomew walked into a hospital doing his job in April and never walked out. The man accused of killing him, Alphanso Talley, was a seven-time felon riding an ankle monitor a Cook County judge had strapped on him twice under Illinois's SAFE-T Act, the state's cashless-bail law, the second time months before the shooting and over a prosecutor's written objection that no set of conditions would keep him from hurting someone. Talley had seven prior felony convictions, four of them robberies, and was already on pretrial release for battering a correctional officer when the judge freed him again. The judge did it anyway. Bartholomew is dead, the judge is still on the bench, and last week he reportedly found time to hold two courtroom deputies in contempt for being slow to remove handcuffs from a different murder suspect. You can't make this stuff up. I stopped trying years ago.

I've spent a career as a fiduciary in the financial world and the last 11 years testifying as an expert witness on what it means to owe someone a duty of care. Under FINRA Rule 2111, the industry's suitability standard, if I put a client into a concentrated position I know is loaded with risk, and it blows up, I don't get to shrug and say hindsight is 20/20. I get sued, and if I ignored red flags a reasonable professional would have caught, I lose. That is the whole architecture of fiduciary law: knowledge of risk plus a bad outcome equals accountability. A judge who releases a known violent recidivist and watches him kill someone operates, in practice, under a lower duty of care than the guy managing........

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