Ex-COPA Investigator Suspended From Practicing Law For 6 Months

CHICAGO — A North Side attorney who left her job as an investigator for the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, or COPA, while under indictment on official misconduct and disorderly conduct charges has had her law license suspended for six months.

Alison Yohanna, 39, illegally searched for and accessed records from the Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting, or CLEAR, database dozens of times while working at the police oversight agency between December 2017 and December 2018, records show.

And when Yohanna suspected one of her co-workers had reported her to the Office of the Inspector General for improperly accessing records, she submitted an anonymous complaint to authorities alleging that he was plotting a mass shooting at the office.

According to a complaint and petition with the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Illinois Supreme Court that Yohanna's attorney said she does not dispute, she searched for and illegally accessed records about Chicago police officers, including her then-boyfriend, people who shared his last name and her brother.

Yohanna also improperly accessed the CLEAR database records about the COPA investigation into a December 2017 bar fight involving former Chicago Police Department officer Robert Rialmo. Her then-boyfriend was the reporting officer in the incident.

Rialmo, the officer who fatally shot Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones in December 2015, was acquitted of criminal charges related to the bar fight at a July 2018 bench trial. Last year, an Illinois appellate court affirmed the Chicago Police Board decision to fire Rialmo.

COPA supervisors learned that Yohanna had provided a co-worker with a copy of the summary report into the Rialmo bar fight, which recommended her then-boyfriend be suspended for five days, and in December 2018 the city's inspector general opened an investigation.

Yohanna was assigned to administrative duties but not initially informed of why she was being investigated. But she suspected that the co-worker with whom she had shared information about the bar fight probe was responsible.

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"As a result of her suspicion, [Yohanna] became angry with [her co-worker]," according to the complaint filed with the state's attorney oversight board.

Using her work computer, Yohanna then submitted her own anonymous complaint about the co-worker to the Office of the Inspector General on Dec. 28, 2018:

"[He] has been carrying a firearm to the office. He is not allowed to have a gun at the office. Even if he is legally registered," she wrote. "He has been planning on carrying out a mass shooting here. He has also told me that he plans on shooting everyone in the Intake area first because of the way the office is designed. The people that work in that section would have no way to escape. He last told me about his plan on Christmas Eve."

This led to an immediate police response to the offices of COPA and the inspector general. Yohanna said she admitted to investigators that she wrote the messages, and she was indicted in January 2019 on two counts of official misconduct and one count of disorderly conduct.

In March 2019, Yohanna was notified that she would be terminated and offered the opportunity to voluntarily resign, which she did the following month.

Yohanna entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in January 2020, with prosecutors dropping two of the three charges against her as part of the agreement before a judge terminated the probation period due to the COVID-19 pandemic and dismissed the final charge in September 2020, according to court officials.

Since leaving Chicago's civilian police oversight agency, Yohanna has worked as a tax expert and doing document review and has no plans to resume practicing law, according to her attorney and the counsel for the administrator of the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.

"It's been a big learning experience for me, and I honestly feel like a different person now," Yohanna told members of an ARDC hearing panel in August. "It's hard to even put into words all the changes, but I've grown a lot from it, and, you know, I'm very sorry, and I've moved forward with my life, I can assure you."

The suspension of Yohanna's law license began Dec. 14 and is set to run through June 14.