The ticket-fixing trial of former Will County Judge Patricia Schneider resumed Tuesday with the questioning of a deputy clerk whose testimony Monday had sparked a demand for a mistrial.
Grundy County Associate Judge Paul A. Root refused to halt the trial, saying he did not believe prosecutors acted intentionally when they failed to alert defense attorneys to portions of the testimony that would come from deputy clerk Jodi Hicks.
Root allowed defense attorneys Edward Genson and Rosanne Pulia to interview Hicks in private about testimony that apparently had caught them by surprise.
The request for a mistrial centered on Hicks’ contention that Schneider sought to have four tickets that were written to her friends and relatives dismissed, but later changed her mind and the notation “dis” on the tickets was painted over with correction fluid.
In earlier testimony, Hicks was unclear about whether Schneider’s request to eliminate the dismissals came before or after the tickets were brought to the attention of other court employees.
Genson said that the photocopies of the tickets prosecutors Doug DeBoer and John McCabe gave him did not show the notation “dis.” However, the notation was clear on the tickets themselves.
Genson said he should have been warned by prosecutors because he believed dismissals would be more damaging in the minds of jurors than other tickets involving Schneider, where the drivers got court supervision. Court supervision is a form of probation that preserves a clean driving record if no more violations occur within a year.
Returning to the witness stand Tuesday for the third day of testimony in a Joliet courtroom, Hicks repeated her assertion that Schneider told her to enter dismissals on three tickets written to Schneider’s friends and one to her son, James.
The tickets were among about a dozen that Hicks said Monday the ex-judge had pulled from her desk on July 11, 1994, and asked the clerk to dispose of without her name appearing in the files.
Hicks said she did not dispose of the tickets because a supervisor in the clerk’s office took over handling the files after Hicks told her about the meeting with Schneider.
Under cross-examination by Genson, Hicks admitted on Tuesday, as she had earlier before a grand jury, that she lied in initial interviews with investigators about how the stack of tickets reached her.
Initially, Hicks had not told investigators that Schneider had tickets in her desk but contended instead that they were brought to the clerk’s office by Schneider.
At different times Hicks explained the lie as an attempt to protect Schneider or said it was prompted by fear of Schneider and her family, Genson said in arguing the point outside the presence of the jury.
Hicks conceded that the eventual rulings on the tickets after they were processed by other judges proved more lenient than those that had been sought by Schneider.
Schneider is accused of fixing two traffic tickets, one for the son of a friend of her sister and a second for an employee of her brother’s homebuilding firm.
Defense attorneys are seeking to show that no one benefited from Schneider’s handling of the tickets and that tickets were frequently processed in Will County without the defendant being present in court.
The case, which is being tried before a jury of 11 men and one woman, is scheduled to continue Wednesday. Schneider faces another trial later this summer on charges that she fixed tickets for her son, niece and brother.
