A judge who manipulates the courts

By BOB GREENE

Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice James D. Heiple, speaking before the cameras once he had successfully prevented seven police officers from testifying against him, said that he suspected what the real reason for his troubles was:

He was being punished for writing the court decisions that removed the children who were known as Richard and Joe from their homes.

Heiple said that no judge can be expected to predict the future when ruling on where a child should live; he said that although things had gone very wrong in the life of the boy known as Joe, a judge has no way of knowing what might happen on the day the judge writes his court's decision. He has said this same thing before: "That the adoption subsequently turned out bad does not render the appellate decision bad. If that were the case, no judge could ever risk passing on any custody or adoption case. From time to time, adoptions and custody placements go bad."

How dare he. Heiple, who so energetically wrote the decisions that removed Richard and Joe from their homes, advocated refusing those children even the most cursory of hearings on their own behalf. Now that he was the one facing his day in court, Heiple used every legal maneuver he could come up with to give himself the best possible chance. When it came to those voiceless children, though, he could not come up with a single way to give them even a minute in a courtroom on their own behalf, to try to find out the circumstances of where they were being sent.

And now he's using those boys. He took no interest at all in them, once he had written the decisions that sent them away. Now, though, he is standing on their backs to help himself. No one else has brought those poor children into Heiple's judicial misconduct case; he's the one who is trying to throw those boys into the case, and he's doing it for one reason: to help himself.

He refers to the life of the child known as Joe going bad, as if he feels genuine regret. Heiple would have no way of knowing what happened to Joe were it not for what has been reported here; he and his appellate panel - with Heiple writing the order - took that child from a safe, loving home where he was to be adopted, and gave the boy to a convicted felon and his wife who were not related to Joe in any way. Since that time, that child has been shipped from home to home, has been placed in a locked mental-health facility, has been charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault, has been abandoned by the woman to whom Heiple's order gave him, has seen his life become despair built upon despair. Heiple's order would not even permit a lower court judge to look into where Joe was being sent. It took us years to find out what had happened to that poor, lost boy - and that is the only way that Heiple is aware of Joe's life.

And now, when it suits him, Heiple is dragging Joe and Richard into his own case. At Heiple's disciplinary hearing in Collinsville, Ill., the parents who were going to adopt Joe - Craig and Karyl Findley, of Jacksonville, Ill. - sat in the spectators' gallery. When Heiple, in front of the cameras, brought up the case of Joe, they could hear every word he said.

"I was in shock," Mrs. Findley said. "I was so angry. For him to posture as a martyr, and to use what has happened to Joe as some kind of explanation for why he is facing ethics charges.

"He broke the law, and he was trying to get away with it and he got caught. For Heiple to equate two years of his being under public scrutiny with the abuse our child has had to suffer ... it's outrageous."

Craig Findley, watching Heiple talk about the little boy the Findleys loved, and then seeing Heiple throw himself onto the furniture in the hearing room to show what he claims Pekin, Ill., police did to him (Heiple had made sure the Pekin officers were not allowed to be heard, and were gone from the room, before he did this), said:

"I think he has lost touch with reality. He is a desperate and confused person. Does the man have any grip on reality at all?"

Heiple, having made sure that no witnesses against him would be permitted to utter a word, continued to plead his own case before the cameras, free from cross-examination. If only those two boys, Richard and Joe, had been able to manipulate the courts the way Heiple has.

Chicago Tribune