Four of five sitting judges appointed Cook County Associate Judges

The Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts has today released the names of the 10 men and women chosen as Cook County Associate Judges.

In the new judicial class are four who won't need to buy robes: William Edward Gomolinski and Demetrios George Kottaras, who were recalled to judicial service by the Illinois Supreme Court after earlier appointments expired; LaGuina Clay-Clark, who has been sitting by Supreme Court appointment to the Steele vacancy in the First Judicial Subcircuit; and William Richard Jackson, Jr., who was appointed to the countywide Riley vacancy but was not chosen for a seat by the Democratic Party when it recently set its slate.

The other six new associate judges are Carmen Kathleen Aguilar, pictured at left, who made an unsuccessful bid for a 4th Subcircuit seat in 2008; Clarence Lewis Burch, who headed up the defense team of Juan Luna, who was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to life in prison for the Brown's Chicken killings; Neil H. Cohen, also a criminal-defense attorney (and one-time chief of the of the narcotics unit in the Cook County state's attorney's office) ; Stephen James Connolly, who was 'pre-endorsed' by the Democratic Party for a judicial vacancy that never opened up in 2008; Assistant Public Defender Bernard Joseph Sarley, a member of the public defender's homicide task force and the capital litigation bar; and Jeffrey L. Warnick, of Prusik, Selby, Daley & Kezelis, P.C.