The Zoom webinar will be held at 6 p.m. Wednesday although advanced registration is required.
The Staleys have called Springfield home for nearly two decades.
Julie Staley is president of the Staley Museum in Decatur, as well as CEO and owner of Spencer Films and president at Spencer Theatre Company.
Staley is a reporter/producer/host for In Focus, which airs on WSEC-TV and WSIU-TV.
She is also a former news anchor.
Staley is the daughter of Bob Heil, owner of Heil Sound, who pioneered sound systems for rock concerts, working with The Grateful Dead and The Who, among others.
A Springfield police officer charged with six counts of criminal sexual assault, custodial sexual misconduct and official misconduct made a brief appearance in Sangamon County court from the county jail via Zoom Thursday.
Associate Judge Jennifer Ascher read the six complaints filed against Taylor Staff, who was arrested Wednesday by Illinois State Police at his home.
Staff, a three-year veteran of the Springfield police, was denied a reduction of bond from $250,000 to $150,000. Staff has a preliminary hearing March 4.
Staff, who was represented at Thursday s hearing by Sangamon County assistant public defender Victoria Kerr, told the judge that he planned to retain his own attorney.
Photo courtesy uis.edu/illinoisinnocenceproject Charles Palmer, center, is escorted by Illinois Innocence Project staff to see family and supporters after his 2016 release from prison. Charles Palmer was exonerated and released in 2016 after serving 18 years of a life sentence. Now he is seeking a certificate of innocence (COI) from the state s highest court. An exoneree must have a COI in order to get compensation from the state. Palmer was exonerated after being convicted of first-degree murder in Decatur. He was released in 2016, with the help of the Illinois Innocence Project, based at University of Illinois Springfield. The project provided new DNA evidence. Palmer was convicted in 1999, largely based on speculative testimony and blood traces found on the inside mesh of his shoe. However, scrapings from the victim s fingernai
Sarah Scheufele admits that she hasn t had all of the answers over the last year.
Between the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol and the peaceful protests at the Illinois State Capitol and throughout the country following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, she posed a question, How much do you tell a nine-year-old about what s going on?
Her son, Grayson, is a third-grader at Lindsay Elementary School. While she was unable to answer every one of his questions over the last year, she was able to answer the question she posed.
By Rachel Otwell (Illinois Times)
• Feb 25, 2021 Travis Stansel / Illinois Public Media
Two former University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students are suing the University of Illinois for failing to protect them from a professor they say was violent and exploitative. The lawsuit, filed last month in the Illinois Court of Claims, alleges the university focused on generating income from Chinese students at the cost of protecting students.
The lawsuit outlines claims that are part of another lawsuit the former students filed in September 2019 against former UIUC professor Gary Gang Xu. Both lawsuits allege that he raped and assaulted a former undergraduate student and forced another former student to do work for his commercial projects, for which she was uncredited and unpaid. The 2019 lawsuit, which is pending in federal court in Urbana, also claimed that the university had a financial incentive to keep what it knew about allegations against Xu quiet