It was close to 11 AM on Tuesday, January 5, when Cook County circuit court Judge Martin Moltz said in open court that he thought Governor J.B. Pritzker’s eviction moratorium is “utter idiocy.” According to an attorney representing a property owner, the eviction case before Moltz, which had been filed in October, was a “post-foreclosure matter.” The former owners who had lost their house had allegedly illegally reentered it. The new owners, Kirkland Group—a Tennessee-based real estate investment firm—were trying to get an eviction order from the judge, but since this was a residential case, Moltz was bound by the moratorium.
The fight to put eviction court on the record stretches back to more than five years ago, when a coalition of legal aid organizations, tenant advocacy groups, and court watchdogs led by the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts mounted a campaign to get the state supreme court to fund installation of recording equipment in these courtrooms. The funding was secured in 2019 and, after another four months to get the recorders up and running, eviction court was finally on the record for the first time since 2003. Five months later the pandemic hit. Though residential evictions have ground to a near-halt, landlords are still filing cases and claiming emergencies to get exceptions to the moratorium. Commercial evictions, which aren’t covered by the moratorium, resumed in July. With court held on Zoom, proceedings are easier than ever to record, but they haven’t been.
Rob Kahn, whose family law practice is one of the oldest and most respected on the landlord side of the bar, says he’s got “bigger fish to fry” when it comes to problems in pandemic-era eviction court and “the recording isn’t even on my radar.” He wouldn’t specify what those fish are, but said he doesn’t think an absence of court recording infringes on litigants’ rights to appeal.
“We want court reporting or court recording in order to provide for accountability in every Cook County courtroom,” says Rich. It would be difficult to scrutinize the qualifications and behavior of judges whose words and actions in open court are never on the record and whose decisions aren’t regularly subject to appellate court review.
