06.29.09 Judges say they are are clearing away backlog of criminal cases
By Jerry Crimmins
Law Bulletin staff writer
Vol.155, Issue 126
A major push to dispose of Cook County's oldest criminal cases has cut these cases by more than a third in nine months.
To help reduce jail overcrowding, Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans last year assigned five new judges to Criminal Courts to preside exclusively over cases that at least two years old.
Since last September, about 300 out of the original 850 such cases that were identified have been disposed of.
This is according to statistics from Paul P. Biebel Jr., the presiding judge of Criminal Courts, and Peter Coolsen, court administrator of the Criminal Division.
"I was kind of pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of the program. It exceeded our expectations,'' said Dennis J. Porter, supervising associate judge at Criminal Courts.
Because the vast majority of defendants in these cases are inmates of the County Jail, disposing of these cases helps reduce overcrowding in the jail, court officials said.
In the process, judges learned that private lawyers are over-represented in Criminal Courts' oldest cases.
Defendants have private lawyers in about 50 percent of these matters. The rest involve public defenders.
In the normal case distribution at Criminal Courts, only 20 percent of defendants have private lawyers and 80 percent have public defenders, according to Coolsen's estimate.
One reason private lawyers are over-represented in the oldest cases, Porter said, was that the defendants switched lawyers one or more times. This caused the litigation to be dragged out.
"If you hire your own attorney, you can get rid of the attorney easily," Porter said.
But when a defendant is represented by a public defender or another appointed lawyer at taxpayer expense, the defendant has to make a showing of why changing lawyers is necessary, Porter added.
Merely the threat of transferring an old case to the five supplemental judges often caused the lawyers involved to get busy and try the case or negotiate a solution, Coolsen said.
"What moves cases is prepared attorneys,'' Coolsen said, quoting his favorite court expert, Ernest C. Friesen, author of "Managing the Courts."
Coolsen said 93 of the 300 cases that were disposed of were taken care of by the original judges before the planned transfer to the supplemental judges.
Biebel began to transfer some of the oldest cases to the supplemental judges Dec. 4. The transfers continue periodically as more cases reach the two-year mark.
Evans assigned these five relatively new judges with backgrounds in criminal justice to Criminal Courts last year to tackle these oldest matters. They are Timothy Joseph Joyce, Steven J. Goebel, Domenica A. Stephenson, Angela Munari Petrone, and Neera Lall Walsh.
Biebel said the mission of these supplemental judges was "to help reduce delay and backlog,'' and help lower the caseloads of judges at Criminal Courts, which Biebel said now average 260.
Last year's "A Report on Chicago's Felony Courts'' by the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice Criminal Justice Project said a more proper caseload would be 104 cases per judge.
In the last nine months, Biebel, Porter and the five supplemental judges have reviewed about 1,000 two-year and older cases - as older ones were disposed of and newer ones qualified, Coolsen said.
About 45 percent of these cases have been deemed appropriate to transfer to the supplemental judges with an eye toward disposition, Coolsen said.
About 55 percent of these cases had special problems and thus were left with their current judges. These included cases in which the state has said it will seek the death penalty. They also included cases in which the defendants or witnesses are in federal custody for other reasons and are not available, or cases that were already very close to trial, and instances in which the defendants faced numerous charges for separate crimes and the state has elected to prosecute the defendant for something else first.