Ginger Leigh Odom appointed to 1st Subcircuit vacancy

The Illinois Supreme Court today entered an Order appointing Ginger Leigh Odom to the 1st Subcircuit vacancy created when Judge Carl A. Walker was elected to the Appellate Court.

The appointment is effective June 23 and terminates December 7, 2026.

Odom currently serves as Director of the Expungement Unit in the Office of the State Appellate Defender.

A press release issued by the Supreme Court in conjunction with Odom's appointment notes that Odom has service with the OSAD for over 20 years, becoming Director of the Expungement Unit in 2020. She has been licensed as an attorney in Illinois since 2003, according to ARDC.

Odom additionally serves on the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Access to Justice where she is a member of the Forms Committee and as an adjunct professor of law at the DePaul University School of Law, according to the Supreme Court's press release.

A profile of Odom on the Chicago-Kent Law School website (Odom is a 2003 graduate of that school) says that she was a "non-traditional student." Odom grew up in Texas and moved to New York to study dance and theater as soon as she was old enough, in the mid-1980s, when the city’s artists were caught in the throes of the AIDS epidemic. A single parent while attending law school, Odom waited tables and tended bar to pay her bills. Quoting now from the Chicago-Kent profile:

“The night that I found out that I passed the bar exam, I got a call from a person that I had never met,” says Odom. “She asked what I would do now that I’d passed the bar. I told her I wanted to work on death penalty cases. She said, ‘Do you want to work for me?’”

The woman was Sheila Murphy, the first female presiding judge in Cook County. She gave Odom a job working a death penalty case out of Texas.

With Murphy’s support and encouragement, Odom again applied to the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender and the Office of the State Appellate Defender, both of which had rejected her just months ago.

Odom joined OSAD. She did apply for associate judge, in 2021 and 2022, and she did present her credentials at a Cook County Democratic Party pre-slatemaking event in 2023.

Odom's appointment was made pursuant to an application process announced by Supreme Court Justice Joy V. Cunningham in December 2024.