Political Rewind: Illinois Supreme Court OKs Cameras in Trial Court

Editor's Note: This article was created by aggregating news articles from Illinois Statehouse News that were written by various Illinois Statehouse News reporters.

Illinois Supreme Court Gives OK for Cameras in Trial Courts

It is time for Illinois courts to become more transparent by allowing cameras into courtrooms, Illinois Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride told Illinois Statehouse News in an exclusive interview.

On Tuesday, the state Supreme Court announced it will allow trial court proceedings to be filmed and tape recorded for the first time in the state’s 194-year history.

Illinois is one of 14 states where cameras in trial courtrooms are either not allowed or not used, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association, a professional organization serving the electronic news profession and dedicated to setting standards for news gathering and reporting.

“The idea behind this is simple. We need to have the courts be more open. By having the public keeping an eye on what is going on in the courtroom, it can act as a check in the balance of power,” Kilbride said.

But the value of cameras in courtrooms goes beyond accountability to help instill public trust in the court system, said Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit center for journalism studies in St. Petersburg, FL.

“If we don’t have cameras in courtrooms, it’s left up to shows like Law & Order to give the public an impression of what is going on in the judiciary,” he said. “Of course, what is going on in the courts is much better than that, and the public should be able to see what is really going on.”

The new policy includes some restrictions:

• Jurors and potential jurors may not be photographed.
• Cameras and recording devices will not be allowed in juvenile, divorce, adoption, child custody and evidence suppression cases.
• No more than two television cameras and no more than two still photographers will be allowed in a courtroom at one time.
• Victims of violent felonies, police informants and relocated witnesses may request that the judge prohibit them from being photographed.

Although the policy goes into effect Tuesday, the chief judges of Illinois’ 23 circuit courts are responsible for implementing the policy. Once a chief judge of a circuit court applies and is approved by the Supreme Court, news media may request to cover eligible cases electronically in that circuit court.

— Andrew Thomason

Increased Illinois Higher Education Funding Goes to Pension

llinois’ 12 percent increase in higher education spending this year isn’t going to benefit students. Instead, the additional funding for fiscal 2012 is going into the State Universities Retirement System, or SURS, to address its underfunded pension program.

“These SURS appropriations do not go to individual institutions or agencies and are not available to be used for educational purposes,” according to the footnote in a study released Monday by Illinois State University, or ISU. 

SURS, which is responsible for the pensions of the state's university employees, is facing an unfunded liability — how much it owes in benefits compared with how much assets it has on hand — of $17.2 billion, according to its 2011 annual report.

Illinois has a total stated unfunded pension liability of $85 billion, but a 2009 study by the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management puts the figure at as high as $219.1 billion. The study didn’t specify how much it estimates SURS’ portion to be.  

The “rapidly increasing appropriations” have pushed Illinois’ higher education spending from $3.2 billion in fiscal 2011 to $3.6 billion this fiscal year, according the annual Grapevine study of state support for higher education put out by Center for the Study of Education Policy at ISU. 

The dramatic increase in the amount of money being given to SURS, and the other state pension systems, seeks to make up for decades of chronic underfunding by governors and legislators, and shrinking returns on investments because of the stagnant economy. 

Funding that made it to the college or university classroom decreased this year compared to last year by 0.76 percent, from $1.62 billion to $1.6 billion, according to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, or IBHE, which oversees the state's higher education system. Those figures reflect money going directly to education, such as operating expenses, and don’t include capital spending.

The amount of taxpayer money making it to the universities for daily operations has been on a downward slide for a decade, said Alan Philips, deputy director of the IBHE. 

“In more recent years, it has been largely a result of the state’s fiscal challenges. The state just doesn’t have a lot of money,” Philips said. “It’s probably not very likely we’re going to see increases in state funding for education, and we’ll be lucky if (higher) education funding is held flat.”

— Andrew Thomason