These 7 Candidates Want A Rare Open Seat On The Illinois Supreme Court

CHICAGO — Seven candidates running this spring in pair of partisan primaries for a rare open seat on the newly redistricted Illinois Supreme Court made their case to the public at a candidates forum Tuesday.

To maintain their majority on the state's highest court, Democrats must win at least one seat on the seven-member court outside the three that are elected from Cook County. As a result, the race for the 2nd District seat could be pivotal in shaping the court's balance.

Four Republicans and three Democrats are running in their respective primaries for a 10-year term representing the newly formed district.

Once justices are elected, no one gets to run against them. Instead, they just need at least 60 percent of those who cast ballots in their race to say "yes" to retain them.

Following the 2020 election, when 3rd District Democratic Justice Thomas Kilbride became the first-ever Illinois Supreme Court judge to fail to meet the 60 percent threshold in an retention election, state lawmakers redrew the boundaries of the court's districts for the first time in more than a half-century.

The court's 2nd District was reduced in size from 13 counties to five. It now includes only DeKalb, Kane, Kendall, Lake and McHenry counties, with DuPage County shifted from the 2nd to the 3rd District.

The changes in districts reduced the 3rd District's Republican majority, making both it and the 2nd District potential swing districts. In past elections, according to the Center for Illinois Politics, the five-county district went to Rauner by 23 points in 2014, Pritzker by 2 points in 2018, and Joe Biden by 18 points in 2020.

On Tuesday, a coalition of chapters of the League of Women Voters of Illinois held a candidate forum for all seven 2nd District candidates. The forum came less than a week after a Cook County judge ordered the names of three of those candidates returned to the ballot, reversing an earlier Illinois State Election Board decision.

Candidates from both parties were asked the same questions, and the rules of the forum forbid them from talking about or to one another. Republicans went first.

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Republican Candidates

Susan Hutchinson, the former McHenry County prosecutor who has spent more than four decades on the bench, including serving in the Elgin-based 2nd Appellate District since 1994, emphasized that she is the only candidate running in either party with experience as an appeals court judge.

"The learning curve will be minimal, I believe, for me, because everything is written," Hutchinson said. "If you really want to know who I am, all you have to do is look on the Illinois State [Courts] website. Everything I've said or agreed to in the last several years is in writing.

Hutchinson said the hundreds, if not more than a thousand, decisions that she has written or participated in over the years on the court would give voters a flavor of who she is and how she decides cases.

"And while I can't promise you lower taxes, I can't promise you that you'll be rich the day after the election, I can promise you that I will continue to fairly serve the people of the 2nd District," she said.

Dan Shanes, the deputy chief judge in Lake County and former presiding judge of the felony division there, was the first Republican to jump into the race. During the forum, he was cagey when asked for his views about recent state legislation affecting the judicial branch.

"Those of us who have chosen to become judges choose not to exercise our First Amendment rights so that we can perform our judicial function," Shanes said.

"These laws all get litigated, and as a judge, I do hope to be on the Illinois Supreme Court, and that is where I'd like to render an opinion on exactly whether that law is constitutional," he added, responding to a question about dark money in judicial elections. "For a judge who would express an opinion, or a judicial candidate who would express an opinion on the merits of a law outside of court — they become disqualified from hearing that case, and I'm not running to sit on the sidelines, I'm running to uphold the rule of law in the Illinois Supreme Court."

John Noverini, a Kane County circuit judge for more than a dozen years, said the most valuable traits for a judge are listening, learning, demeanor and decision-making. He said his background was in business, banking and education law, but when he started as a judge he began in the Family Law Division.

"I had never done a divorce. I never was a divorce lawyer. I've never been divorced, fortunately, but I was willing to learn and that's what judges have to do. They have to be willing to learn because they don't know everything," Noverini said. "The bottom line is you have to be to keep an open mind. That's important. You perform your duties impartially. Your personal views play no role in your judicial decision-making process. So you treat everybody that comes in with respect, with dignity, and you hear both sides of the case and you make a decision."

Noverini said this year's Supreme Court race was the most important on the ballot — more important than the race for governor or U.S. Senate — because it could determine the balance of the state supreme court for the next decade.

"The 2nd District's been gerrymandered," Noverini said. "Right now, this district is probably +8-10 points Democrat, and that's not by accident. The Democrats want to control the Supreme Court, as they've controlled the Supreme Court since 1964."

Mark Curran, the former Lake County sheriff and 2020 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, is the only Republican candidate without experience as a judge. His campaign has emphasized anti-abortion and anti-Masonic themes, and he said he would be guided by a natural law philosophy.

"You know, as a county, state, federal prosecutor, I've probably tried more juries and anybody on the panel — great candidates and great people — but I do have that background," Curran said.

"Ultimately, for Republicans that are going to vote initially, it's, you know: 'Who's going to win?'" he said. "And I ran in these five counties that we're running in at this point in time in a primary two years ago, and I won all five counties, and I won all of them with over 50 percent and with ridiculously large margins, and then I went on and beat Sen. Durbin in McHenry County and fought hard in the other counties, and did better than President Trump did."

According to the Illinois State Bar Association's judicial candidate evaluations of the Republican quartet of candidates, Hutchinson and Shanes are "highly recommended." Noverini and Curran are "not recommended."

Democratic Candidates

Rene Cruz, who was first appointed to the bench a decade ago, grew up at Fort Sheridan in a military family and went to law school in DeKalb before moving to Aurora and practicing law there for 17 years. He said he would take the administrative skills that he has demonstrated in the past several years as the presiding judge of the family law division and apply them to the state Supreme Court's role overseeing lower courts.

"The time of thinking outside the box, I like to tell people, is over. This pandemic has actually put us in a position to reinvent the box. Since the pandemic shift, I've done exactly that in Kane County," Cruz said.

"I was the one that brought, initially, Zoom to our courthouse in the Family Division. When I was told that we would have to shut down for two weeks, I couldn't let that happen, because the users of the system would not benefit from it, and we had we were up and running within a week," he said. "I also, during that timeframe, helped spearhead an initiative to improve our interpreting services, as well, and as a result, we saved our taxpayers $270,000 in 2021, and also I'm eliminating the need for defendants to appear in court in my courtroom if their attorneys are going to be there as well."

Elizabeth Rochford, a Lake County associate judge, said she began her career as a teacher before spending 35 years in and around the practice of law, including clerking for a "personal injury titan," working as a prosecutor, in private practice as a commissioner on the court of claims.

"The resume must match the position and mine does," Rochford said. She said her judicial philosophy requires her to be self-examining, to look for ways to improve and to be responsive to changing needs, as was required in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The change that we certainly didn't know that we wanted, we never asked for it, but it was probably the best thing that ever happened to us, in terms of pushing us to a new level of service in the courts," she said. "When the pandemic hit, and we had to translate what we had always done very traditionally in a courtroom to Zoom, and we have learned in that process that we can better serve the community in so many ways."

Nancy Rotering, three-term mayor of Highland Park and former candidate in Democratic Party primaries for 10th District congressperson and Illinois attorney general, said she was recruited to run for the Supreme Court this time by "Illinois leaders within the legal community and beyond."

Prior to her election to the City Council 13 years ago, Rotering spent seven years in private practice focused on health care fraud and abuse, pivoting to advocacy on behalf of students with disabilities in 2001 when her child entered public school, she said. In 2015, she founded the North Suburban Legal Aid Clinic, which provides free legal services. She said last year's criminal justice reform bill would have mean many more people coming through the court system without having to post cash bail.

"We're recognizing that for far too many people they've been imprisoned because of being poor nothing more," Rotering said.

"We will be seeing, hopefully, a more compassionate and a more appropriate approach to adjudicating these criminal cases," she added. "We know that in the state of Illinois, we need to provide more resources for pretrial services, for public defenders. I hope that that will be a priority in an effort to ensure that everybody has fair representation, adequate representation under the law."

According to the Illinois State Bar Association's judicial candidate evaluations of the three Democrats, Rochford was "highly recommended," Cruz was "recommended" and Rotering was "not recommended."

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During the League of Women Voters forum, the two non-judge candidates, Curran and Rotering, expressed the most openness to the idea of increased courtroom transparency in terms of media coverage, which is, in general, highly restricted by the Supreme court but left to the discretion of individual judges in specific cases. Shanes said he was the only candidate who had taken part in the Supreme Court's extended media coverage pilot program.

"Transparency is good public access is good. But like most things, everything's not all good or all bad," Shanes said. "It depends upon the situation."

Several candidates from both parties bemoaned the fact that new changes to state campaign finance law limits their ability to raise money from people who do not reside in Illinois, and all of them assured the public that political contributions would have no effect on their decision-making process.

"I have relatives out of the state who cannot contribute to me through any means. They're probably happy about that," Hutchinson said. "But that's not the point, I'm not happy about that."