Why We Court-Watch
Why do we court-watch?
Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts conducts court-watching in a variety of civil and criminal courtrooms in Cook County. Our volunteers observe courtrooms as a means to demystify the judicial process, hold judges and other court stakeholders accountable, and help strengthen our research and advocacy. A court-watcher’s purpose in the courtroom is to assess the atmosphere, culture, and character of the courtroom to understand how judges influence the environment and collect data to inform future advocacy efforts and ongoing research of Chicago Appleseed and our collaboration partners.
As we’ve discussed in the past, courtroom culture impacts litigants’ access to justice by influencing how the legal process operates. Northwestern University researchers Maria Hawilo, Kat Albrecht, Meredith Martin Rountree, and Thomas Geraghty recently court-watched at the Circuit Court of Cook County’s George N. Leighton Courthouse, which hears felony criminal cases and published their findings with “How Culture Impacts Courtrooms: An Empirical Study of Alienation and Detachment in the Cook County Court System,” in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. The researchers observed a major difference between the “insiders,” who work in the court system, and the otherized “outsiders,” who are subjected to the vagaries of the court system. They outlined numerous failures to deliver equal justice in the Court, which consisted of many micro- and structural-level failures, and argue that these procedural and design failures together constitute the overall culture.
How do we court-watch?
Culture is precisely what Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts’ court-watching program equips volunteers to observe. After undergoing training specific to an advocacy or research project, court-watchers enter the virtual or physical courthouse to observe the larger culture of the courthouse and the micro-cultures of the individual sessions/courtrooms. Our court-watchers do not observe the quality of judges’ rationales or their compliance with precedent but rather look at the microcultures of each courtroom to understand how this environment impacts litigants. Over the years, we have used court-watching to provide anecdotal evidence of courtroom culture in various studies, such as $tate of Injustice: A Community Review of Bond Courts in Illinois and “Slipping Through The Cracks” – An Evaluation of Cook County’s Domestic Violence Division in Chicago (2022), Monitoring Cook County’s Central Bond Court: A Community Courtwatching Initiative (2018), Videoconferencing in Removal Proceedings: A Case Study of the Chicago Immigration Court (2005), and many others.
Similarly to the Northwestern “How Culture Impacts Courtrooms” study, Chicago Appleseed’s methodology overlaps in our court-watching process; however, our program has a number of unique features:
- Because our court-watchers are community volunteers, they provide unique and valuable perspectives on the functioning of our courts. Our court-watchers observe proceedings to collect case outcome data, observe judicial behavior and culture, or to understand general court functioning. Most of our court-watchers do not have legal training, and likely provide fresher eyes and bring fewer preconceived assumptions with them. At the conclusion of the observations, they analyze repeated themes and other features presented in the data from court-watchers in each courtroom on a particular day. The themes that emerge provide insight on the environment of the courtroom and any access to justice issues that may arise.
- Rather than simply observing courtrooms without a set methodology, Chicago Appleseed’s court-watching is targeted. We seek to use qualitative data from observers to supplement research that is already underway for specific advocacy projects. Based on interviews with stakeholders, we identify specific issues and features of certain courtrooms or divisions. Court-watchers then pay particularly close attention to these topics, allowing many different people to each conduct a more limited number of observations, expanding the reach of our court-watching. In particular, observers focus on the judicial temperament and culture in each courtroom.
What has court-watching taught us?
The value of court-watching in this age of mass incarceration and judicial mismanagement cannot be overstated. Over the years, our organization has learned extensively about our courts through placing court-watchers in the Bond Courts, the Criminal Courts, the Federal Immigration courtrooms, Domestic Violence Courts, and in other specific judges’ courtrooms across Cook County. There are a variety of themes – stories of racial disparities, abuses of power, and gross mismanagement – that we, in addition to the Northwestern researchers, have continually observed, such as:
Lack of Respect for People’s Time & Experiences
The lack of respect for people’s time begins with the commute to the courthouse, while the indignity of their experience begins as soon as they arrive. Getting to the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago from the Loop takes around an hour by public transit, although the vast majority of the disproportionately Black and Brown people who enter the courthouse come from areas worst served by transit on the South and West Sides. Once people arrive at the courthouse, they immediately encounter the division between the “insiders” (lawyers, police, and court personnel), who can enter the building swiftly with only a “perfunctory check,” and everyone else, the “outsiders” and “bystanders to the criminal legal system,” who must wait in a long line and check their cell phones in lockers by the entrance.
Upon entering prior to the judge-ordered time of 9:00 AM, the bystanders often discover that they must wait an hour before the Sheriff’s Deputy will admit them into their courtroom, and then still longer for the judge to actually take the bench. Meanwhile, the courtroom Clerk, Assistant Public Defender, court reporter, Assistant State’s Attorney, and Sheriff’s Deputy will gradually enter; all of these personnel usually remain assigned to the same courtroom each day, resulting in an atmosphere reminiscent of a “company break room.” Once the judge takes the bench, the call lasts for two-to-four hours, but is punctuated by frequent recesses of between five and thirty minutes when the judge leaves the bench. During this process, most of the hearings take less than two minutes, but people must “spend hours waiting in the courtroom for their case to be called, or for their loved one to appear, or waiting to confront the person who has harmed them.” A majority of cases are called for status conferences that merely “churn” the case in a horrifically inefficient manner, wasting everyone’s time.
Opacity of Proceedings
The Court’s proceedings are very opaque. Insiders consistently use legal jargon, even when addressing lay people and when they could easily substitute more accessible language. Proceedings are difficult to hear, especially from the galleries, and judges routinely turn down or mute microphones. The Northwestern researchers note that at least one judge made court inaccessible for an observer by denying her permission to use a hearing access device, and our court-watchers and interviews with practitioners have noted issues with interpreters (especially in the context of Domestic Violence proceedings).
Failures of Accountability
The system continually fails to hold “insiders” accountable for actions that harm litigants’ access to the courts. While legally, only the judge can excuse a subpoenaed person from court attendance, the Northwestern researchers noted at least one instance where the judge appeared to complain to their supervisor about subpoenaed police officers being “excused” from court attendance. Still, the system does not seem to empower them to actually remedy the issue or hold accountable those who are so “excused.” Judges often complain about attorneys arriving late and unprepared, which results in delays and extensions of case timelines, but they do not seem to have a mechanism to hold the lawyers accountable short of contempt, which is seen as an extreme step, or punishing the defendant, who should be blamed for their lawyer’s shortcomings.
This overall lack of actual accountability mechanisms for any insider actors prevents the system from acting optimally, to say nothing of the complete lack of accountability for judges beyond the theoretical, but functionally non-existent prospect, especially for systemic-level failures, of non-retention at an election that could be six years away.
What’s next for court-watching?
As a tool of democracy, court-watching has tremendous untapped potential. Judges play a central role in the American legal system. Selection of a competent, diverse, and honest judiciary is therefore a crucial mechanism to protect judicial independence, on the one hand, and promote democratic control of judiciary on the other. Empirical studies suggest that voters are almost entirely uninformed about judge behavior, and that trial judges retain office at high rates. In essence, our court-watching program aims to equip individuals – lawyers and non-lawyers – with the tools to keep their public servants accountable.
Chicago Appleseed is currently working on court-watching projects in Cook County’s drug treatment and mental health specialty courts, restorative justice courts, civil asset forfeiture calls, and others. We would be honored to have you join us in our efforts to equip students, educators, organizations, and the public with this indispensable education and expand the program.
If you want to volunteer with or donate towards this court-watching effort, please contact us. We have protocols in place to protect volunteers, and you do not need any legal background. Click here to learn about becoming a volunteer court-watcher for Chicago Appleseed.
Authors: Jennifer Won Young Lee (she/her) is the Collaboration for Justice’s first Jill Dupont Memorial Fellow and a licensed paralegal; Stephanie Agnew (she/her) is the Director of Communications for Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and a Licensed Social Worker (LSW); and Max Lupin is a recent graduate of Harvard Law School who completed his Public Interest Law Initiative (PILI) Fellowship with Chicago Appleseed in the summer of 2022.