Probate Division update: Docket books out, screens and keyboards in

A note and an accompanying photo from the Chief Judge's Office:

Cook County Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans met with Probate judges and staff on Friday, September 27 to celebrate the opening of new Probate Division Courtroom 1813. This new courtroom replaces the antiquated docket room and is updated with high tech equipment which will improve access to justice for lawyers and litigants. As of October 1, 2024, cases assigned to guardianship of minors' estates Calendar 1, are being heard in the new courtroom by Judge Daniel R. Degnan. Pictured are Judge Terrence J. McGuire, Chief Judge Evans, Judge Degnan (seated), Presiding Judge Daniel B. Malone, Judge Susan Kennedy-Sullivan, and Judge Amee Alonso.

I wonder if there are any docket books left in the Daley Center; this may be the finish. When I started out, there were docket books in every division. Unlike a lot of court files, the old books were too big and heavy to grow legs and walk away. The status of any given case could be ascertained, even if the file jacket was missing. Or, and this sometimes proved to be the case, the file was not missing, but actually accounted for, only in another location, such as a courtroom.

Technology is great -- you're reading this, aren't you? -- but it is subject to hacking by enemies foreign and domestic, sunspots, power outages, and (perhaps, someday) control of all those AI entities we're so heedlessly setting up and letting loose. Is there no one left who saw James T. Kirk or Dr. Who fight existential battles with megalomaniacal machines? Those old TV shows were warnings, people....

Trial of Socrates to be broadcast May 10 on Lakeshore PBS outlet

Quick question before we get to the plug: In this age of streaming, does the word "broadcast" still have meaning?

Partial answer -- and this does start to ease us into the actual topic of this post -- WYIN, the Lakeshore (NWI) PBS outlet which will carry this presentation of The Trial of Socrates on Friday, May 10, at 9:00 p.m., was available on UHF Channel 56 back in analog days, and presumably still is found on 'channel 56' if one uses a digital converter for one's old analog set.

(There will be a brief pause here while the Millennials and Zoomers in the audience go "huh?")

The forthcoming TV program was filmed at Chicago's Harris Theater in 2023, when it was presented by the National Hellenic Museum. John Kapelos portrayed Socrates.

Kapelos is portrayed in the photograph above, on the right, with one of his defense attorneys, Robert Clifford of Clifford Law Offices PC. Also representing Socrates in the trial were Dan K. Webb, of Winston & Strawn LLP, and Sarah King, of Clifford Law Offices PC. The People of Athens were represented by Patrick Collins, of King & Spalding LLP; Tinos Diamantatos, of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP; and Julie Porter, of Salvatore Prescott Porter & Porter, PLLC. Presiding over the trial were Illinois Supreme Court Justice Joy V. Cummingham, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Alonzo, and Circuit Court Judges Anthony Kyriakopoulos and Anna H. Demacopoulos. (Demacopoulos retired from the bench after the filming of this trial.) Media personality (and museum trustee) Andrea Darlas served as trustee.

FWIW plugged the event when it was live (and a CLE opportunity) in 2023. Alas, there is no CLE connected with this televised presentation.

The Trial of Socrates will be rebroadcast on Lakeshore PBS on Thursday, June 13, at 9:00 p.m. For more infomration on how to find Lakeshore PBS on your own cable system or streaming devices, click here.

A video trailer for The Trial of Socrates is available for viewing on NHM’s YouTube page. The Trial of Socrates was directed by Brian Kallies and produced by the National Hellenic Museum. The lead sponsors for The Trial of Socrates are The Jaharis Family Foundation, Calamos Investments, and Clifford Law Offices.

Court adjourned: Harry Anderson passes away

Harry Anderson, who played Judge Harold T. Stone on TV's Night Court from 1984 to 1992, has passed away.

I will be playing a lot of Mel Tormé records today.

Avy Meyers signs off

This weekend it became a little more difficult for Cook County voters to make informed choices in judicial elections.

Avy Meyers, 66, passed away on Memorial Day.

The long-time host of North Town News Magazine, Meyers was perhaps best known to FWIW readers as the interviewer of Cook County judicial candidates. Election law attorney and frequent NTNM guest James P. Nally called the program a source of "consistent coverage of judicial candidates to the general public." Both longtime collaborator (and entire technical crew) Sonny Hersh and frequent guest (and "lifelong friend, although we didn’t realize that until we were over 50") Michael A. Strom stressed Meyers' comfortable, relaxed, "non-confrontational" interviewing style.

This was certainly true: Meyers was not Mike Wallace. Sometimes his questions morphed into soliloquies, a la Chet Coppock, but judicial wannabes and candidates for all manner of local and countywide offices came in pilgrimage to Meyers' West Rogers Park home because, as Hersh put it, Avy gave "both sides on an argument equal unbiased access, though he had his own strong opinions." Nally agreed that Avy "was a man of strong opinions, but to his credit was interested in listening to the viewpoints of other people as well, and providing them, via his show, a chance to share those opinions." Strom also recalled that "Avy was unfailingly polite and generous on air, even to any candidates he intensely disliked due to prior experience or conduct he deemed unacceptable."

While Avy occasionally served up a controversial opinion in the course of asking a question or making an aside, Meyers usually saved up his own unvarnished views for exposition in the pages of Jewish Chicago. There, Strom noted, Meyers was as passionately judgmental as a movie reviewer.

I think Avy would like to be remembered at least as much for his writing as for his cable and You Tube presence. As Strom noted, Meyers studied journalism, and became the Chicago Defender's first white reporter. Assigned to criminal trials, it was while working the Defender's courthouse beat that Meyers developed, as Strom put it, his deep appreciation of the "power of judges to decide child custody, division of community property, and criminal trials where jury rights were waived."

In addition to providing the editorial content for Jewish Chicago, Meyers sold ad space for his publication. He was immensely proud of the fact that his endorsements were not influenced by the size of an ad purchased by a candidate, or whether a candidate bought an ad at all. When pressed, Avy could cite many examples of candidates who bought large ads, only to have him endorse an opponent. While, as Hersh noted, many of the candidates and their consultants in time became Meyers' true friends, Avy reserved an uncharacteristicly harsh assessment for those few who thought his endorsement (and good will) could be bought.

For his judicial endorsements, Meyers would rely on a panel of experts. The exact composition of that panel will now be lost to history. I was not a member; Michael Strom was. "There were other experts," Strom said, "and he did not always listen to me. To my surprise, sometimes he was right about candidates I tried to talk him out of endorsing."

Sonny Hersh recalled that Avy was very proud of the many awards that their cable access show won, though Meyers never boasted of it, Hersh said. Among these awards were an Award of Excellence in Community Outreach from the Illinois State Crime Commission, and three National Awards for Best News Show and Making a Difference in the Community conferred by the Alliance for Community Media.

Avy Meyers "put in long hours taping and editing each show," Strom recalled, "and certainly was not getting wealthy doing it." Hersh added, "All interviews were uncut and complete, except for an occasional expletive or mention of fundraising, which is not allowed by our outlets, so those were bleeped." Hersh had worked with Meyers almost from the beginning of NTNM: The show started in 1991, and Hersh came aboard as "all things technical" in 1993 when he became a certified producer at CAN-TV. Hersh saw the show evolve from one which was entirely community-based into something more politically-centered. "I think last cycle there were 50 interviews of judicial candidates," Hersh said.

Hersh said the judicial candidate interviews allowed people to see that judicial candidates are real people, and what sort of people they are. Strom added, Avy "saw his duty as allowing the candidates to present themselves as actual people, and allowing actual voters to see who the candidates were selected make up their own minds." Strom cited an old Yogi Berra-ism in describing how Avy's interviews allowed voters to make meaningful evaluations of judicial candidates: "You can observe a lot by just watching."

For my part, I will be ever-grateful for Avy giving me my first television exposure since I got picked for a tug-of-war on the old Bozo's Circus. Ringmaster Ned misheard me when I gave my name---I must have mumbled---because he called me 'Jeff.' And my team lost the tug-of-war.

I think my appearances on NTNM went a little better. Strom recalled that "Avy was hilarious"---and while something Avy said cracked me up more than once on camera, I must agree with Strom that some of Avy's best material was saved for when the camera was off. More than once, I hung around Avy's living room (the show was taped in the dining room) watching other tapings and bantering with Avy, Sonny, and other guests.

As a practical matter, with Avy Meyers' passing, I've lost a partner: Once we stumbled onto each other, Avy and I engaged in regular cross-promotion. I re-posted his candidate interviews; he would plug my blog with guests, on and off camera. We both benefited -- although I'm sure I benefited more from Avy's promotion than ever he did from mine.

Sonny Hersh said he frequently took flak for things Avy would say on the show or write in Jewish Chicago. "A lot of people thought that if Avy said it he was talking for me, too, but it wasn't true. We did not agree on a lot of political issues, but did on some." Their disagreements certainly did not harm their relationship. I didn't agree with everything Avy said or wrote either; I know I cringed more than once on camera and tried to quickly disassociate myself from some comment or other that Avy had just made. But he never took offense. For a man with such pronounced and strongly-held opinions, Avy Meyers was remarkably tolerant of those with whom he did not agree. "This quality is sadly lacking in political discourse today," Jim Nally said.

And this quality---this civility---is in even shorter supply after Monday.

Rest in peace, Avy Meyers.

Bad Judge, worse TV

Kate Walsh plays Judge Rebecca Wright on NBC's Bad Judge

I saw the commercials and was not enthused. Still, I thought it might be fun to watch NBC's Bad Judge and possibly do a review. I thought a review might fit in with the other judge-related stuff I put up here. My son-in-law, Arne, egged me on: There was a doctor, he told me, who blogged his reviews of the Fox TV show House, explaining the medical decisions in each episode, winding up with a book deal from his efforts.

Next to Judge Rebecca Wright,
Judge Harold T. Stone of TV's Night
Court was a reincarnation of Benjamin
Cardozo and Learned Hand

About 15 minutes into the show, I asked my son-in-law if he remembered the doctor's name.

No, he admitted, adding that he wasn't even sure the doctor really did get a book deal out of his online reviews.

Another couple of painful minutes dragged by. "Did the poor doctor keep his license?" I asked.

Bad Judge is truly awful. And I'm trying to be nice. If a creature such as "Judge" Rebecca Wright really did exist, and if she really did the things that the TV character did, she would lose her robe, her law license, and quite possibly her liberty. And that's just from the pilot. To illustrate: Judge Wright's courtroom deputy walked into her chambers while she was engaged in (the network television equivalent of) sex with a witness who had just testified in her courtroom. We were just reenacting a case, she told the deputy. "I know the case," the bemused deputy says, "I saw it late night on Cinemax." Judge Wright and her, um, conferee are still pulling on their clothes when in walks the supervising judge. He wants Judge Wright to "file a motion."

File a motion? Did a page from an old L.A. Law script accidentally get mixed in this mess?

Of course, especially because she's a 'bad judge,' Judge Wright doesn't do as her supervisor requests; instead, she leaves her post in response to a phone call, heading to a nearby grammar school, there to represent a child (whose parents she'd sent to prison) in a dispute with his school. The kid is an artistic soul -- his troubles all come from drawing objectionable pictures of his teachers -- who is being bullied at the group home where he is awaiting his parents' release from stir. We are supposed to think kindly of Judge Wright on account of these efforts, because we the audience are supposed to see that her heart is in the right place, even though she has had "wine and cake for breakfast."

But in Illinois a judge cannot practice law or represent clients, even troubled and bullied young artists. Maybe California is different. I doubt that it's that different.

I could go on, but I won't. First of all, I want to start suppressing this entire experience as soon as possible.

I express no opinion on whether a funny show could be made about a 'bad judge.' But this sure wasn't it.

In Talamine v. Apartment Finders, Inc., 2013 IL App (1st) 121201, ¶17, in a concurring opinion, Justice Michael B. Hyman wrote, "Every ad hominem smear, insult, and innuendo, every speculative accusation, every potshot leveled at members of the judiciary has the capacity of weakening confidence in the judiciary as a whole, confidence which is essential to the vitality of our legal system." Don't get me wrong: I don't think Bad Judge should be taken that seriously. And, even if it were taken seriously, if tonight's episode is any indication, the show is unlikely to be around long enough to do any lasting damage. But, just in case, Mr. and Mrs. America, please do not judge America's judiciary by the character portrayed in the NBC program Bad Judge.

Too much enthusiasm over Osama's anniversary?

There were an awful lot of Westerns on TV when I was a kid (and I watched nearly as much television as the Bill Murray character in Scrooged) -- Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Bonanza.... There were a lot of old Western movies on TV, too -- with John Wayne, of course, but also Alan Ladd or Randolph Scott; Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were always singing on one channel or another.

So I imbibed a heady draught of what I'll call the Western Ethos. Among these principles is that, sometimes, a man is so evil or so corrupt, and the law is so weak or unavailable, the bad guy simply can't be arrested and brought to justice. The hero is forced to take the law into his own hands, and he does what needs doin'.

The important thing is that the hero is not happy about it. It's the grizzled prospector or the comely schoolmarm who tries to offer comfort, if not absolution, just before the end credits roll: "If ever a man needed killin', that one did."

Maybe the hero can stay on as Sheriff, or become Sheriff -- but not to start his own reign of terror, but rather to bring law and order and schools and churches and marriageable ladies into town, to bring the blessings of civilization and the Rule of Law to the hitherto untamed frontier. Maybe, like Gary Cooper in High Noon, he's so disgusted, not just by what his alleged friends and neighbors didn't do, but by what he himself had to do, that he takes off the badge forever and goes off to start a ranch someplace.

Everyone thinks that Jimmy Stewart's character, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is the man who rid Shinbone of its most feared outlaw. The naive lawyer rises rapidly in politics after the showdown, eventually becoming senator from the new state that he helped to hew from the wilderness.

Only he's not the man everyone thinks he is. He knew what really happened, and so did his wife (played by Vera Miles), and so (of course) did John Wayne. Towards the end of Stewart's career, the Stewart and Miles characters come back to Shinbone for Wayne's funeral, and Stewart tries to set the record straight. But, as the newspaperman tells him at the end, "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." The point is that Stewart neither wanted nor deserved the accolades heaped on him as a result of the death of Liberty Valance; he took no satisfaction from it.

This brings us to Osama bin Laden. It is an article of faith for me, as an American lawyer, that "justice" can not be meted out with helicopters and Navy SEALs and firefights. Yet, as an American realist, steeped in the cultural values I absorbed through a small-screen black and white TV, I can't help but agree that, "If ever a man needed killin', that one did."

It's just not a cause for celebration. And the man who did what needed doin' should never, ever be perceived as gloating about it. For that reason, surely, President Obama is ill-served by some supporters who recently 'questioned' whether Gov. Romney would have given the order to 'take out' Osama.

In one clip I heard, Gov. Romney was 'accused' of expressing concern (back in 2007) about violating Pakistani sovereignty in pursuit of bin Laden, and that he should be made to 'explain' himself. Well, no explanation is required.

In 2007 most of us thought bin Laden might be hiding in caves on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border; we had no idea that he had built himself a compound for himself in the shadow of a Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad, a city of about 500,000 just 60 miles or so away from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. Jane Perlez, in an article posted on the New York Times website one year ago today, reported that, "In an ironic twist, the academy [next door to the bin Laden compound] was visited just last month by the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, where he proclaimed that Pakistan had 'cracked' the forces of terrorism, an assessment that was greeted with skepticism in Washington."

Until we knew that the Pakistani government was either deliberately covering up bin Laden's presence or so incompetent that it could not find him in plain sight, everyone was right to be concerned about possibly violating an ally's sovereign territory. Once we knew bin Laden's whereabouts, however, we also knew that we could not inform our gallant Pakistani ally in advance of any raid. Prior notice would almost guarantee bin Laden's successful escape. Nevertheless, sending troops across a national border without permission is called an invasion; it is an act of war. There was, accordingly, even at that late stage, extremely good reason to be concerned about sending in SEAL Team Six. Fortunately, it was in the best interests of both the United States and Pakistan to make nice with each other after the fact -- President Obama, according to an AP account by Kimberly Dozier and David Espo, was careful to stress that he called Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari after the raid to brief him on what had already happened. Pakistan accepted the President's explanation, at least to the extent that we are not now in a state of war with that nation.

In the western movies, the good guy who is forced to take out the bad guy is scarred by his act, not enthused. He knows he's done something to prevent greater wrongs in the future, but only by committing a wrong himself. The townspeople may be grateful, but the hero can not fully accept their cheers. He must live with what he has done. So too must President Obama. I am certain that the President must have agonized about authorizing the mission. He did what he did with resolve, yes, but also with regret -- and any man or woman worthy of the title of President of the United States would have been similarly stressed in those same circumstances. The President's more bloodthirsty supporters need to be reined in; their misguided enthusiasm diminishes all of us.