If an assistant state’s attorney out in Kendall County gets his way, nobody will be allowed to call Joliet police Sgt. Javier Esqueda a “whistleblower” during his trial — if he ever goes to trial — on felony charges of official misconduct.

This assistant state’s attorney, Mark Shlifka, doesn’t want any talk of Esqueda’s supposed whistleblowing because Esqueda’s not a whistleblower, at least not under Illinois law.

To fit the criteria of a whistleblower and enjoy all the protections that entails, Esqueda needed to report what he believed to be illegal activity to a “government or law enforcement agency,” if you’re going to go by what the law says.

Esqueda didn’t do that. Instead, he went to the TV news with a video showing a man named Eric Lurry dying of a drug overdose in the back of a squad car in January 2020.

Lurry was arrested at what police said was the scene of a drug deal and it looked like he was chewing on something in the back of the squad car for quite a while before he passed out. Postmortem testing showed there was enough heroin, fentanyl and cocaine in Lurry to kill 10 men, according to the coroner’s office, and his death came just four months after six died of fentanyl overdoses in the Joliet area in less than a week.

Maybe the illegal activity Esqueda was trying to expose was Lurry’s possession of heroin, fentanyl and cocaine, but prosecutors claim he wasn’t actually interested in shining light on lawlessness. What Esqueda was really trying to do, according...

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