Kane County Judge Donald C. Hudson took a vacation in late October, not long after he had presided over the trial of an Aurora man convicted of murdering prominent Aurora Township widow Jill Oberweis.
No one could argue that Hudson didn’t need a break after the grueling two-week trial. The Oberweis case had dragged through the court for 29 months since 1995, when Edward L. Tenney and another man were arrested and charged with fatally shooting the 56-year-old widow of an Aurora dairy executive inside her home in 1993.
And that was only one of nearly 500 felony cases disposed of in Hudson’s St. Charles courtroom in 1997.
Hudson obviously wasn’t alone in having a heavy workload. Unofficial figures released last week by 16th Judicial Circuit Chief Judge R. Peter Grometer indicate that 2,449 felony cases, including 22 time-eating murder trials, were resolved in Kane County in 1997, a 14 percent increase over the previous year.
“We moved some very high-profile cases this past year,” Grometer said. “Murder cases especially are time-consuming.”
Final numbers for the year are expected to be released later this month, but Grometer said four full-time felony judges, plus a backup, conducted 147 trials through September, 14 more than during all of 1996. Of that total, 83 were jury trials, up from 76 throughout the previous year.
“We can thank our additional judicial resources and a lot of hard work by the judges involved for all of that,” Grometer said.
While Grometer said 1,812 felonies remained pending as the calendar year ended, that number is down significantly from the record 2,760 that were unfinished at the end of 1995.
Since 1994, about 10,000 felony cases have been filed in fast-growing Kane, including about 130 murders.
The crushing load clogged the court system, creating backlogs that not only ate up hours of courtroom time but also left the Kane County Jail stuffed with prisoners awaiting trials that could easily take a year or more to begin.
Kane’s population has increased by about 60,000 residents to around 370,000 since 1990, and crime has grown with it. Last year, a record 2,809 new felony cases were filed.
But Grometer began an aggressive fight against the backlog after he was sworn in as chief judge in late 1995.
The Felony Division was reorganized and a fourth full-time felony judge, plus a backup, were assigned to hear those cases. Before last year, three judges had heard the county’s most serious crime cases since 1986, a year when only 961 felonies were filed in Kane.
Then in December, a fifth full-time felony courtroom was opened after Grometer successfully lobbied the Illinois Supreme Court to authorize the 16th Circuit to bring an additional judge on board.
The circuit now has 30 judges, although a half-dozen are assigned to courthouses in Kendall and DeKalb Counties.
The Kane County Board chipped in with $337,000 to staff and operate the additional courtroom this year, money that Board Chairman Mike McCoy (R-Aurora) believes is well spent.
“That was a priority issue,” McCoy said. “It left our contingency fund a little thinner than we would have wanted, but once that courtroom is up and running, it will be worth it.”
When it is fully operational, Grometer hopes that relatively minor drug cases can be heard virtually full-time in at least one courtroom, expediting those cases through the system and sending offenders to alternative sentencing, somewhere other than the jail for a lengthy stay.
A new 90-bed maximum security wing was opened last year at the jail, which for years has been cited by state officials for chronically overcrowded conditions. The addition brings its official capacity to about 400 prisoners, a number that has been routinely met or exceeded for years.
But McCoy said the jail population appears to have leveled off, and its problems are much less acute than during previous years.
“It seems like what we’ve done so far has helped stabilize the situation out there,” he said. “It’s much less volatile than it was, and I think when the new felony courtroom gets going, that will help even more.”
But, Grometer cautioned, easing the crunch at the law enforcement level represents only a partial solution. Communities must also take a proactive stance in rooting out causes of crime.
“We’re keeping up and in some respects we’re ahead of the curve, but if we can’t find constructive preventive progress, it will be a never-ending battle,” he said. “We can do our share, but we need to work with the communities.”
A number of youth intervention and community policing programs are already in place throughout cities, villages and schools in Kane, Grometer said. Now the court’s Probation Department and the City of Aurora are working together to identify probation violators in a city that must fight a significant gang presence and bring violators back to court.
The Cooperative Agencies Scrutinized Treatment (CAST) program is expected to be implemented this year, Grometer said.
“That will have a significant impact in the criminal community to show that we’re not kidding,” Grometer said. “It may give you a chance to rehabilitate yourself, but if you don’t take advantage of it, we will deal with you.”
Tenney, meanwhile, remains in Kane County Jail, awaiting sentencing in the Oberweis case, in which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Sentencing is expected to be delayed, however, until after Tenney stands trial for the 1993 murder of Oberweis’ neighbor, Virginia Johannessen, who was found dead inside her home on Felton Road in a similar attack about nine months before Oberweis was slain.
That trial is scheduled to begin April 6.
