Biography
Brent Betterly was one of the "NATO 3," arrested before the 2012 Chicago NATO summit and acquitted of terrorism after a jury found the case amounted to mob action and possession of an incendiary device rather than a terror plot. Sentenced to six years, he has since completed his sentence.
Brent Vincent Betterly was the third defendant in the NATO 3 prosecution alongside Brian "Jacob" Church and Jared "Jay" Chase (both already in this database). All three were arrested in Chicago on May 16, 2012, three days before the start of the NATO summit, on terrorism conspiracy charges built around an undercover Chicago Police Department sting in which two officers ("Mo" and "Gloves") supplied the activists with materials to make Molotov cocktails. The state's terrorism charges fell apart at trial — a Cook County jury acquitted all three of all terrorism counts in February 2014, but convicted them of misdemeanor mob action and lesser arson-related charges. Betterly was sentenced in May 2014 to six years in Illinois state prison; with day-for-day credit and pretrial credit (he had been held without bond since the May 2012 arrest), he was released in 2016. The NATO 3 case is widely cited as the first state-level use of an Illinois terrorism statute in a sting operation against political activists.
