My, they’re having a dirty little campaign down Peoria way.
It’s a race for the Illinois Appellate Court, which you’d figure would be a tea party. But when you talk about the courts and talk about Peoria, somewhere, you know, irascible Supreme Court Justice James D. Heiple is going to figure in. And sure enough, here he is.
Heiple is the judge who led some Pekin police officers on a chase through town a few years ago, then berated them and tried to use his position on the Supreme Court to scare them out of arresting him. Heiple narrowly avoided getting impeached over that. He didn’t avoid making a list of the worst judges in America.
Heiple, mercifully, is on his way off the Supreme Court at the end of this year. But he’s trying to build a legacy.
Two years ago, he had a chance to pick a new member of the appellate court. He had several respected, veteran attorneys and judges available to him.
But he picked Judy Koehler, a former state legislator who earned the nickname “the rolling pin” when she ran for the U.S. Senate against Alan Dixon.
Heiple picked Koehler for the appellate court even though she had been a lawyer for only 5 years, and she had spent most of that time not in a courtroom, but writing legislation for an anti-abortion group.
Koehler was green. That didn’t matter to Heiple. He put Koehler on the appellate court. As one lawyer said at the time, “Heiple just mooned everybody.”
Yes, he did. But the appointment only lasted for awhile. To keep her job on the appellate court, Koehler has to run for election this year in a district that stretches from Will County past Peoria to the western state line.
She has competition. There’s a Peoria attorney named Karen Kendall and a law professor named Michael Closen running against Koehler in the Republican primary. Kendall has been a lawyer for 19 years. Closen has taught at John Marshall Law School since 1976.
What a lot of nerve they have, running against Judy Koehler, who by now has been out of law school for all of seven years.
The day after Kendall announced in September that she would run, she got a stern letter from Justice James D. Heiple, written on the official stationery of the Illinois Supreme Court.
Heiple ripped Kendall for, among other things, claiming in her announcement that she wasn’t a politician. Heiple sent copies of his letter on Supreme Court stationery to six appellate judges in central Illinois.
“I was shocked,” Kendall told me. “That was kind of the beginning of a sequence of things that I didn’t anticipate to occur in a judicial campaign. My emotional response was, I was intimidated by it. I took it as an attempt to discourage me.”
That was just the start.
Last month, the Tribune published a letter from Chicago attorney Raymond Mitchell, ripping Kendall for having a “cynical view of judicial decision-making” and being “all too eager” to do the bidding of “rabid special-interest groups.”
It turns out Ray Mitchell was a law clerk for Heiple from 1996 to 1998, although he says he has not talked to Heiple about this race. Kendall’s answer to his letter is in today’s Voice of the people.
But the strangest thing of all in this race for the appellate court is the guerrilla fax campaign.
A daily fax slash-and-burn called the Kendall Examiner has been showing up here. Whoever writes it fancies himself a writer. “Before the darkest night be passed, I ply my trade so that the dawn must come and you may shed the light of day on our false subject: Karen Kendall,” each fax says.
Last week, a press release came over the fax machine. It said the Illinois State Bar Association was delaying its judicial recommendations while the bar investigated Kendall. It was a fake.
More Top Picks Air Mattresses
And some outfit calling itself Federalists 2000 sent its “endorsements” for the appellate court to the Peoria Journal-Star. Federalists 2000 claimed that Michael Closen supports same-sex marriage and that Kendall was “unfit for any judicial office.” It endorsed Judy Koehler.
Who’s sending this stuff? Who knows. Koehler says she knows nothing about it. Heiple says he knows nothing about it, and that his letter to Kendall was intended to “correct a misstatement” about the appointment of Koehler.
So the organizers are a mystery. But it doesn’t take Oliver Wendell Holmes to figure out the intent.
The guerrilla campaign goes after Kendall and Closen. There’s only one other candidate in the Republican primary. That’s Judy Koehler.
Last week, the Illinois State Bar Association released its recommendations for the appellate court. The bar found that Kendall and Closen were qualified for the appellate court. Koehler was not.
Things got even worse for Koehler. She’s been on the appellate court for nearly two years, but apparently not many people think she has learned much on the job.
The bar polled attorneys who practice in the appellate district. Nearly 80 percent of the lawyers said Judy Koehler does not have the legal ability to serve on the court. Kendall and Closen got very high marks.
That news didn’t make the latest issue of the Kendall Examiner.
———-
E-mail: [email protected]