On Tuesday, October 22, more than four months after installation of court recording equipment began in all five of the eviction courtrooms at the Daley Center, green lights were shining on the mikes but no recordings were being made. It took years of lobbying by the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and other groups to convince the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts to allocate some $370,000 to supply Chicago’s eviction courtrooms—which process about 20,000 cases every year—with microphones for creating transcripts of court hearings. Physical installation of the equipment was completed in early September, and since then, according to the chief judge’s office, software problems have gotten in the way of generating recordings. After the Reader inquired last week about when the equipment was expected to be fully functioning, the office confirmed that recordings finally began last Friday, October 25.
Outside the courtroom, Murphy said that she’d lived on the second floor of the two-flat building for five years. Muhammad had purchased the building from a previous owner last February. Since then, Murphy said the cockroaches in her three-bedroom apartment have gotten so bad that they cluster around door frames, congregate in the fridge, and crawl into her three kids’ bookbags. “They’re taking roaches to school, do you know how embarrassing that is?” she said. “My youngest is depressed.” She said she’d tried to exterminate on her own and showed photo after photo of the bugs, along with pictures of rotting plumbing and bathroom faucets that require pliers to turn. Though her landlord’s lawyer had offered her a deal to pay back some of what she owed, get more time to move out, and have her eviction case sealed, Murphy thought it was wrong that she should have to pay anything at all for a unit her landlord was failing to fix. She had hoped the judge would see things from her perspective, especially since a city inspector had just been out to the property on October 10 and, per the online log of building code violations, documented rotting doors, crumbling walls, high weeds, mold, broken windows, leaks, standing water and raw sewage smells in the basement, mice and roach infestations, and missing smoke detectors.
On June 18, a week after the recording equipment began to be installed in eviction courtrooms, Skryd and another circuit court judge appeared at a talk hosted by the Chicago Bar Association. According to a recording and transcript of his remarks, Skryd explained to an audience of attorneys that the recording equipment was installed in eviction court after lobbying by “special interest groups” who “felt that indigents that appeared in those courtrooms, or litigants that wanted to appeal their case—they were at some kind of a disadvantage because they didn’t have transcripts of the proceedings.” The groups that lobbied for the recording equipment “have an agenda,” Skryd said. “They’ll always take the example of someone who was all of a sudden removed from their home through the eviction process and they’ll take that person and feature them in some kind of article and next thing you know judges and property owners are contributing to homelessness, that it’s the judges and the property owners that are responsible for this.”
While suburban Cook County eviction courtrooms still aren’t equipped with recorders or staffed by reporters, litigants who find themselves in eviction proceedings at the Daley Center can now request transcripts by calling 312-603-8400 or visiting suite 900 at 69 W. Washington. v
