Chapter 108: Two-Party Consent
Courtroom 302 at Twenty-Sixth and California is on the third floor and smells of floor polish and wet coats.
The nineteenth of March, nine in the morning. Judge Renata Salcedo. People versus Montigue.
Simone Adeyemi came with me from the clinic on West 63rd and sat in the second row so I would have somewhere to look.
Marina Kessler argued for fifty-one minutes and she never once raised her voice or said anything untrue.
Illinois is a two-party state. That is the whole of it.
720 ILCS 5/14-2. It is a crime in this state to record a private conversation without the consent of every person in it.
Not a rule of evidence. A felony.
Kessler stood up and said, in her second sentence, that the State’s principal witness had committed a Class 4 felony one hundred and eighty-seven times.
She had counted the files. There were one hundred and eighty-seven of them on the device, between the eleventh of March and the ninth of September 2026.
“This is not a woman who happened to be recording,” she said. “This is a woman who recorded a private household continuously for half a year and now asks this court to reward her for it.”
I sat with my hands flat on my knees and let it happen, because Adeyemi had told me the night before that the only thing that could go wrong in the morning was my face.
Vukovich argued for nineteen minutes.
She made two points and she made them in the order that mattered.
The first was the definition, which Kessler had walked past.
The statute does not prohibit recording. It prohibits recording a private conversation, and the statute defines that phrase: a conversation which one or more of the parties intended to be private under circumstances reasonably justifying that expectation.
“The statement at issue,” Vukovich said, “was made at raised volume, in the entrance hall of a house, with an employee standing on the staircase eleven feet away and a second employee on the floor. Whatever else it was, it was not private. Nobody shouts in a hallway with a witness on the stairs and then claims an expectation of confidence.”
The second was the exception.
720 ILCS 5/14-3. A person may record a conversation when they have reasonable suspicion that another party is committing, or about to commit, a criminal offense against them.
“Ms. Carter was on the floor of that foyer,” Vukovich said. “She is the person against whom the offense was committed. The exception was written for exactly this and nothing else.”
Kessler had an answer and it was a good one.
“The exception requires that the recording be made because of the suspicion. Ms. Carter’s device was already running. It had been running since March. She did not turn it on because she was in danger. She was in danger and it happened to be on.”
Salcedo said, “Counsel, are you arguing that a woman is better protected if she is quicker with her thumb?”
“I am arguing that the statute says what it says, Judge.”
“It does,” Salcedo said. “Sit down, please, I want the witness.”
They called me at twenty past ten.
I had testified twice before, both times in September, both times about eleven minutes of my life.
This was different. This was about six months of it.
Kessler did not start with the foyer. She started with a date.
“Ms. Carter, when did you withdraw from your nursing program?”
“The twelfth of March, 2021.”
“How many credit hours had you completed?”
“Ninety-one.”
“And how many does that program require?”
“One hundred and twenty-two.”
“So you are thirty-one credit hours short of a qualification you have never held.”
“Yes.”
“You are not a nurse. You have never been a nurse.”
“No.”
“You hold no license of any kind from the State of Illinois. No certification, no registration, nothing any board in this state has ever examined you for.”
“That’s correct.”
She let that sit for four or five seconds, and every one of those seconds was a decision she had made in advance.
“And yet you kept what you have called, in your own handwriting, a clinical log.”
“I kept a record.”
“You wrote durations in seconds. You wrote color, recovery, intervention.”
“Yes.”
“Those are the words a nurse uses, Ms. Carter.”
“They’re the words I was taught to use.”
“By a school you did not finish.”
“Yes,” I said.
Adeyemi told me afterwards that I answered every question in under two seconds and that this was the only thing that saved me, because the moment you start explaining you have started arguing, and a witness who argues is a witness with a stake.
Then Kessler picked up a page and looked at it for longer than she needed to.
“Ms. Carter, on the fifteenth of September 2026 you were suspended from your position.”
“Yes.”
“On the sixteenth of September, the day after, you made another recording.”
“Yes.”
“On what authority?”
“Dr. Moreno’s.”
“Dr. Moreno does not employ you and does not own that house.” She set the page down. “So let me ask it plainly, and then I’ll sit down. You recorded a child every night for six months. Did you ever tell that child’s father you were doing it?”