Illinois lawmaker Kam Buckner says he wants to move forward after pleading guilty to second DUI
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As state Rep. Kam Buckner of Chicago prepared recently to plead guilty to driving under the influence charges leveled against him in Springfield, the 36-year-old called the arrest a learning experience from which he planned to grow.
It was Buckner’s second guilty plea to DUI charges under strikingly similar circumstances, public records show. The first occurred nearly a decade earlier in Urbana. In each case, police said they found Buckner asleep behind the wheel of a running car.
Nobody was hurt in either incident but the two guilty pleas raise questions for the up-and-coming state lawmaker who has said he’s considering a run for Chicago mayor next year and currently represents a state House district that stretches from the Gold Coast to the Far South Side. Earlier this week, Buckner was asked by the Tribune to explain the two incidents and he said there were extenuating circumstances to the 2019 incident.
“I would say there’s some more nuanced context to that,” Buckner said when asked whether he learned anything from the 2010 DUI.
He then discussed the 2019 arrest.
“As I said in 2019 when the situation happened, part of what I learned was that as you deal with personal stuff, I don’t know how deep I’ll go into this part publicly but I was shuffling back and forth between Springfield,” Buckner said. “My father was at that point, we thought, on his deathbed. He ended up not dying until a few months later. And, you know, I learned kind of about … how to really handle stress and if you ever have to ask yourself if you should be behind the wheel the answer is just you shouldn’t. Just straight up like that.”
The 2019 incident in Springfield has received some media coverage. In that arrest, an officer with the Illinois secretary of state police found Buckner asleep behind the wheel of his running Land Rover at a stoplight about one block from the Illinois Capitol in the early morning hours of March 29, 2019, according to a police report.
A Springfield police officer arrived and reported “the strong odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from his breath,” according to the report. Buckner’s “movements were slow and he swayed slightly. His speech was slow and he struggled to form sentences on occasion,” the report stated.
Buckner declined to give a breath sample to test his blood alcohol level in the 2019 incident, according to police. He pleaded guilty in that case on March 11, and was sentenced to 12 months of conditional discharge, according to Sangamon County court records.
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The 2010 case, which has not received significant news coverage, occurred in Urbana. Buckner, a former University of Illinois football player who had graduated a few years earlier, was found “passed out in the driver’s seat” of a running Honda Accord in April 2010, according to a police report. When an officer tried to wake him, Buckner took his foot off the brake and the vehicle “rolled approximately one block” before Buckner stepped on the brake and stopped it, police said.
Asked by officers how much alcohol he had consumed, Buckner said, “I drank one beer. I’m not drunk. I fell asleep,” according to the report. There was an empty bottle of Hennessy in the back seat of the car, according to police.
After a field sobriety test and his arrest, a Breathalyzer test found Buckner to have a blood alcohol level of 0.18%, more than twice the legal limit, according to police.
Buckner pleaded guilty to driving under the influence in September 2010, and was sentenced to 24 months of court supervision and 200 hours of public service, according to Champaign County court records.
Buckner said he has not hidden the 2010 DUI, and said he has also spoken about it publicly, just like he has the 2019 Springfield case.
“It’s a moment that I wasn’t proud of, right, it’s a moment that I can’t take back,” Buckner told the Tribune this week. “It’s a moment that I can only learn from both personally, spiritually, professionally, which I have done.”
Buckner also was arrested in Champaign in 2007, on accusations of aggravated assault, obstructing justice and resisting a peace officer. But the Champaign County state’s attorney’s office declined to press charges following that incident.
Buckner told the Tribune he had taken a bat away from someone “who I thought was probably going to use it for the wrong purposes” outside a large party, when a police officer, who had arrived because of a noise complaint, pulled a gun on him.
“And I dropped (the bat) and I was extremely cooperative with them. There were people outside yelling, like, ‘You can’t, you can’t, you shouldn’t be using a gun. You shouldn’t be using a gun. He’s not doing anything,’ ” Buckner told the Tribune. “And so … even without a lawyer, charges were dropped immediately. I did nothing wrong that night.”
The Tribune viewed a Champaign Police Department report of the 2007 arrest, which corroborated Buckner’s version of the event.
Gorner contributed from Springfield.
