April 12--Former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds was released on his own recognizance Monday, hours after his arrest at an Atlanta airport on a warrant issued by a federal judge in Chicago for violating his bond on pending misdemeanor tax charges.
Reynolds was taken into custody after getting off a flight from Johannesburg, where he'd spent more than a month tending to a daughter he says is seriously ill, federal officials said.
An Atlanta magistrate judge later released him on his own recognizance, according to Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago. He has been ordered to report in person to court officials in Chicago by Thursday afternoon, according to his lawyer, Richard Kling.
The warrant was issued April 1 by U.S. District Judge John Darrah in Chicago after Reynolds emailed a statement to news outlets declaring he intended to stay in South Africa in violation of his bond.
Reynolds, 64, has been allowed to travel to Africa twice since pleading not guilty last year to four misdemeanor counts of failing to file a tax return, but he's also clashed with court officials several times.
In November he drew a warning from Darrah after it was revealed he had traveled from Johannesburg to Zambia without court authorization to see a doctor there about his daughter's condition. A few months earlier, he blasted efforts by court officials to have him placed on electronic monitoring while on bond, saying he was being punished because of the color of his skin.
"In 2015, they want to treat a black man like he's a slave," Reynolds said at the time.
After Darrah ordered him back to Chicago earlier this month, Reynolds emailed another release to the media, titled "They Didn't Hear the 'Angels' Speak," that railed against an allegedly racist justice system and accused the judge of heartlessly dismissing his daughter's health problems because she is black.
"In a society where black men are often seen as abandoning their children, I have been ordered to abandon my black child," Reynolds wrote. "She has done nothing in her young life that would justify the system being this callous towards her."
Reynolds said that when he broke the news to his daughter, a 23-year-old college student who may need surgery for scoliosis, she "was devastated and fell into a pool of disbelief."
"'But what about me?' she shrieked," Reynolds wrote. "What she does not understand is that the federal criminal justice system is heartless."
The controversy over Reynolds' travel marked another twist in the strange career of the disgraced former lawmaker, who is scheduled to go to trial May 2 on four misdemeanor counts of failing to file federal tax returns. Once a rising political star, Reynolds had a spectacular fall when he was convicted in 1995 on charges of criminal sexual abuse, child pornography and obstruction of justice for having sex with a 16-year-old former campaign intern, then trying to sabotage the case against him. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
In 1997, while serving his state prison sentence, Reynolds was convicted again -- this time in federal court on 15 fraud counts related to illegally raising campaign cash and defrauding banks out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was sentenced to 61/2 years in federal prison.
But hours before leaving office in 2001, President Bill Clinton commuted Reynolds' federal sentence with two years left to serve.
jmeisner@tribpub.com
