Jim Doyle wore the robe for 17 years, rendering judgment on thousands who came through his Kane County courtroom. On a rainy night in April, it was his turn to be judged.
Sixty people filled a VFW Hall in Batavia to hear Sen. Chris Lauzen (R-Aurora) “correct the record” on his friend Doyle’s turbulent leadership of the county’s drug court. The judge had founded it in 2000 to offer petty criminals help for their addictions instead of prison time, and it swiftly became a personal crusade. He worked from dawn until deep in the night to nudge defendants toward sobriety, and he was rewarded with spirit-lifting transformations: crack-scarred mothers reuniting with their children, teenage junkies graduating from high school, thieves and prostitutes gaining respectable jobs.
But some say the judge’s ambition became its own intoxicant. In 2005, state investigators accused him of forcing people into the supposedly voluntary program, jailing them improperly and bullying defense lawyers, probation officers and others who didn’t seem to share his passion.
After a bitter struggle, Doyle retired last year rather than face a disciplinary hearing that could have forced him from the bench. It was an anti-climax that ended his legal trouble but left his legacy undefined.
That’s what Lauzen hoped to settle with his town hall meeting. As Doyle watched, silent and serene, the senator flipped through a chart of statistics that he said proved the judge’s drug court was responsible for a steep drop in crime. Former defendants stood up to testify that Doyle’s tough love had turned their lives around.
“I hated Judge Doyle. I fought the program every way I could,” said Jeff Norton, lean and intense, a recovering crack addict who now runs a tree-trimming business. “But after I got clean for six, nine months, I figured out what real life was about, what a clear head was about, and I became a better husband, a better father.”
As the judge’s supporters spoke, a muscular, flat-topped ex-con named Tommy Ratz prowled the room, the light glinting off his metallic crucifix. He had a different story to tell. A one-time cocaine user who served time for aggravated battery, he’d been in Doyle’s program for almost two years before leaving over what he claimed was unjust treatment, including being jailed for nothing more than cursing.
He was no saint, he told the crowd, but neither was Doyle. He said the judge played favorites, abused his power and drank up praise as though he were infallible.
“Anyone who puts on a uniform is not beyond reproach, unless it’s according to you!” Ratz shouted at Lauzen, ignoring dozens of furious glares. “People sin, people fail and people do the wrong thing because we are human . . . He’s not a bad man–he’s a man!”
The argument over Doyle’s tenure on the bench still divides Kane County’s legal and recovery communities. To some, he was a visionary whose dedication liberated hundreds of drug users from the hell of addiction. To others, he was arrogance personified, a jurist who shredded the Constitution to play the redeemer.
The paradox of Judge Jim Doyle is that both views might be true. Through the force of his devotion, he helped save many a soul blistered by narcotics. His downfall was trying to save them all.
“But for his determination, we might not have a drug court in this county,” says Kane County public defender David Kliment, whose staff frequently tangled with the judge. “He was very driven to do it. He was equally driven to see it succeed. But you can’t succeed at any cost.”
In the early 1970s, Doyle worked his way through law school as a patrolman in his hometown of suburban Berkeley. A former football lineman, he was tall and stout with a dark, square face that appeared hewn from Irish stone. But it was his size 15 shoes that got the attention of his fellow cops: They nicknamed him “Feet.”
The job gave him his first look at the human wreckage left by alcohol and drugs. He saw women beaten raw by drunken husbands, teens maimed in boozy car wrecks, perps turned into the walking dead by heroin.
Like most cops at the time, he had little pity for those with addictions. He thought substance abuse was a moral failing, an affront to society’s rules. The only way to deal with it was to lock them up.
He kept that opinion long after he graduated from John Marshall Law School and rose through the legal ranks of Kane County. He became a judge in 1989 and watched an endless parade of losers blitzed by narcotics slouch through his courtroom.
“You’re not to do any more drugs,” he’d tell them. “If you walk out of here today and you do drugs, the next time you come in here you’re going to go to the penitentiary. Do you understand that?”
They always promised they’d stop. But they always came back.
Then, in 1998, he handled the case of Jesse Tecuanhuey, a fragile, soft-eyed 18-year-old from St. Charles with a full-blown heroin habit. To pay for his drugs, the teen burglarized a liquor store, swiped cash from the register at Montgomery Ward’s, even stole $10,000 worth of meat and seafood from a steakhouse.
He was an ideal candidate for prison. But Doyle was impressed with the effort Tecuanhuey’s parents had put into fighting their son’s addiction, and he cut him a break–five years of probation and an order to get into treatment.
That was the last Doyle heard of the teen, until he ended up dead.
Tecuanhuey had been sent to a 90-day residential program in Downstate Manteno, but was kicked out for breaking the rules. No one seemed to notice: It usually took weeks for word to travel from a treatment center to probation officials and back to the court.
Tecuanhuey returned home and drank heavily in a vain attempt to keep his mind off harder drugs. Finally, on a gray November afternoon, police found him in a cheap Melrose Park motel room, fatally overdosed on heroin and cocaine.
Doyle was shaken. He began to rethink his old attitudes on addicts and crime.
“I spent an absolute career in the traditional setting,” he recalled recently. “But I saw that if we stay in the tradition, failure is what’s going to happen. And these are lives at stake. They’re not just statistics.”
DOYLE WASN’T THE ONLY Kane County official to reach that conclusion. In the mid-1990s, former Chief Judge R. Peter Grometer and some colleagues traveled the country to examine an increasingly popular way to trim court dockets and curb jail overcrowding.
Drug courts allowed low-level offenders to keep their freedom if they submitted to treatment, drug tests and frequent meetings with a judge. The idea was to replace the punishment-based legal system with one focused on beating the addiction.
Grometer liked the concept but was uneasy with some of the judges, who appeared disturbingly casual about their legal obligations.
“It became difficult to distinguish it as a court in some cases,” Grometer says. “It really wasn’t, other than to have the power of incarceration. It was more like a counseling session.”
His group designed a tightly structured system but shelved the proposal when the federal government didn’t offer sufficient grant money. Doyle, though, offered to start a program on a shoestring and received permission to go forward.
On Aug. 15, 2000, Doyle opened the first session of the Kane County Drug Rehabilitation Court with a handful of defendants and no firm operating procedures. Illinois had no laws at the time governing drug courts, so Doyle’s program operated with a liberating spirit of invention.
He switched from a single weekly drug test to three after defendants told him they were timing their use to avoid detection. And when some said they were cheating with herbal “purge products,” he put on a flannel shirt and a Caterpillar ball cap and went undercover at a GNC store in Batavia.
He told the store clerk that he needed something to beat a drug test. She directed him to a locked case where a young man was lurking. The judge asked if he knew anything about the stuff.
“I sure do,” the youth replied. “I’ve got to take [drug tests] for court, and this works for me every time.”
Doyle took the products to city council meetings to urge a ban. GNC soon stopped selling them in the county.
That sort of commitment inspired some of the drug court’s early participants. Matt Sherry, a one-time cocaine and heroin user who stole cars to fund his habit, says he didn’t want to disappoint someone he came to view as a friend.
“[Doyle] treated everybody more than fairly,” says Sherry, who now lives in Sycamore and works as a cable installer. “He had so much respect for everybody.”
As word traveled about the program, defendants poured in by the dozens, pushing Doyle and his small staff into brutal schedules. They arrived at the St. Charles courthouse as early as 5 a.m. so those with construction jobs could get to work on time, and they frequently stayed later than 10 p.m. On weekends, they organized softball and basketball games to give the recovering addicts a taste of wholesome fun.
Volunteers got involved too. Doyle’s wife, Karen, helped out with clerical tasks. The MOM Squad, a support group for the families of addicts, did filing and helped to administer drug tests. Local churches established treatment programs to meet the swelling demand.
The broad support gave drug court the heady feeling of a movement. It was the subject of flattering newspaper and television stories, and Asa Hutchinson, then the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, called it “a national model” after visiting in 2002.
The next year, the court received federal funding and its caseload climbed from 321 to 730. Some believed the growth was too much to handle, and that lawyers were dumping clients in the program merely to keep them out of jail. But Doyle wouldn’t turn anyone away.
“Are you going to tell someone with a drug problem . . . ‘You know, I’m too busy, I’m sorry,’ and then the kid dies?” he asks. “No, I’ll put in the hours. I believed in it, I believed in the kids and I saw the results.”
His determination was driven in part by a religious awakening. Jim Nicodem, senior pastor at the evangelical Christ Community Church in St. Charles, says Doyle was baptized in the faith about the same time he launched the drug court.
“For him, it was like a moment in which he said, ‘OK, I’m going to be really serious in following Christ. So in my role as a felony court judge, I’m going to do everything I can to fight evil,’ ” Nicodem says. “That doesn’t mean just throwing people in jail. It means trying to help them change their lives.”
But not everyone was a believer. Some defense attorneys had longstanding misgivings about Doyle and the way he ran his court. As the program hit its peak, their concerns boiled over.
IN SEPTEMBER 2003, a 26-year-old woman appeared before the judge on narcotics and forgery charges. Doyle had become the first stop for everyone charged with low-level felonies, and he operated under the assumption that all might have substance-abuse problems.
He also believed that confrontation was the best way to convince them to accept treatment, so even though the woman did not have a lawyer, he peppered her with questions.
“Your addiction is Vicodin,” he said. “How long have you been addicted to Vicodin?”
“Can I request a public defender, please?” she said.
“Sure. How long have you been addicted to Vicodin?”
“I am not answering any questions until I speak to a lawyer, sir.”
It was the sort of exchange that infuriated some attorneys. Drug court was supposed to be voluntary, and the lawyers saw Doyle’s aggressive attempts to enroll defendants as coercion.
“You have to follow the law and the Constitution,” says Nils von Keudell, an Aurora defense attorney who clashed with the judge when a client didn’t want to enter the program. “Even drug addicts have constitutional rights.”
Doyle was also loath to let defendants out before he thought they were ready. When a woman asked for a new judge, saying Doyle had unfairly extended her stay in the program, he seemed offended. He reminded her of how his staff had brought clothes to her newborn child, delivered Christmas presents to her house and stood by her through relapse and divorce.
“We’ve worked real hard on this thing,” he said after finally agreeing to relinquish the case. “We’ve . . . tried the best we could to help you, but at some point . . . you wanted to give up on yourself and that certainly has not been my policy.”
Doyle’s most controversial practice was his liberal use of jail. Drug court judges often incarcerate defendants after positive drug tests, but Doyle put people behind bars as a precaution.
It happened to Roger Evans when he accompanied his wife, a drug court participant, to her weekly meeting with the judge. Evans had a heroin problem of his own, and hoped Doyle could use his influence to get him into a methadone program.
“You want help?” he recalls the judge saying. “Well, I can get you help.”
Doyle assumed control of a DUI case Evans had pending before another judge and put him in jail, saying his admitted drug use violated the conditions of his bond.
Evans says he never agreed to enter drug court, and that during three days of incarceration he lost his job and was absent during the death of his grandfather.
“All I had to do was pay the fine [on the DUI case] and it would have been done, but he stole my case and put me in jail,” says Evans, adding that he got off heroin after entering a methadone program on his own. “He helped me out of a job. He helped me out of my freedom.”
Doyle remembers the incident differently. He says he wasn’t able to find a suitable treatment program on short notice, and that Evans knew he would be jailed if he joined drug court. Leaving him on the street, Doyle says, could have meant his death. “They’re coming in there asking me for help. Do I say, ‘Go ahead, you’re going to do another 10 bags of heroin today, another 10 bags of heroin tomorrow?’ “
Some say Doyle used incarceration to manipulate some defendants. The former chaplain of the Kane County Jail, Richard Martin, says he once told the judge that a jailed defendant who was Catholic didn’t want to enter Teen Challenge, a Pentecostal treatment center Doyle had chosen for him.
Doyle, Martin says, replied that the young man “can either go to Teen Challenge or remain a Catholic and stay in jail. I don’t really give a [expletive].”
Doyle says he never made the remark.
“You’ve got to have a heart and soul to be doing this with these kids,” he says. “If I have the heart and soul for doing this stuff, is this consistent? I don’t conduct myself that way, never have in my entire lifetime. If that was my character, you would have known about it a long time ago.”
Around November 2003, a group of attorneys approached then Chief Judge Philip DiMarzio with a stack of transcripts highlighting what they believed to be Doyle’s inappropriate behavior. DiMarzio called Doyle to a meeting.
“I just stressed to him the need to follow the law in all respects, and that it was perfectly consistent with the drug court goals to honor all the rights of the defendants,” he says. “He agreed with me and indicated that there would be no more problems.”
But Doyle continued to quiz potential participants about their drug use, only now he did it after telling the court reporter to go off the record. He says that let him gauge a person’s fitness for the program while ensuring their answers could not be used against them. His critics, though, saw it as a way of hiding unconstitutional conduct, and it was the breaking point.
In January 2004, several attorneys contacted the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board, the state agency that investigates jurists. Five months later, the board ordered Doyle to appear at a disciplinary hearing.
The judge was shocked. He had given his life to the program, and it had helped hundreds to kick drugs. How could it be so misunderstood?
The investigation was supposed to be confidential, but it quickly became the talk of legal circles. Doyle was up for re-election that fall, and the Kane County Bar Association did not recommend him, a rarity for a sitting judge.
Doyle nonetheless kept his job with 83 percent of the vote, his highest margin ever. It would prove to be his final triumph.
IN FEBRUARY 2005, the Judicial Inquiry Board filed a 64-page complaint against Doyle, one of the longest in the history of the agency. It said he flagrantly violated the rights of people who appeared before him and that he threatened those who questioned, angered or challenged him.
The complaint outlined a series of confrontations with the Department of Court Services, which runs probation. Doyle had a well-known disdain for the agency dating back to the Jesse Tecuanhuey case, believing many of its officers didn’t understand or care about drug addicts.
Once, the board said, Doyle confronted the probation officer assigned to a man who died of an overdose. The man wasn’t enrolled in drug court, and Doyle allegedly accused the weeping officer of causing the death.
Doyle was reassigned to desk duty as the investigation continued, and his friends went on the attack. Some accused the defense lawyers of trying to undermine the program to protect their own fees, while Sen. Lauzen took aim at the Judicial Inquiry Board.
“Is Doyle tough?” he wrote on his Web site. “You bet. Have you ever had to raise your voice or punish your own darling children? Judge Doyle is dealing with addicts and drug abusers who live in an environment where people shoot other people in drug-crazed frenzies just to get more! Sorry if we bruise some egos or diminish some misplaced self-esteem.”
But other old allies were conflicted. Members of the MOM Squad, the support group that had become tightly entwined with drug court, declined to publicly back the judge.
“Everyone had their own opinion on it, but as a non-political group we decided to take a neutral stand and let the [Judicial Inquiry Board] get to the bottom of it,” says Lea Minalga, the group’s founder. “I’m sure Judge Doyle felt we abandoned him, but we hadn’t. We were just staying out of it.”
Doyle’s attorney denied some of the allegations and said others were justified under the law. But in February 2006, the board filed an amended complaint accusing the judge of unethical behavior even after he had left drug court.
Incensed, Doyle and his wife discussed mortgaging their house to pay for his defense. It had cost $50,000 even at discounted rates, and they expected to spend another $100,000 to get through a final hearing by the Illinois Courts Commission, the state agency with the power to take away his job.
Gradually, though, their defiance melted into fatalism. Doyle had made powerful enemies, they thought, and the amended complaint was a sign they wouldn’t stop until he was through. So in August, after 17 years on the bench, the judge retired.
“When you’re taking the attack, and they start off with legal issues and then try to go to a temperament issue, then they tried to go to [further allegations], I finally said, ‘You know what, I think it’s just simply time,’ ” he says.
His critics, he says, never understood the unique role of a drug court judge. But John Gallo, the former federal prosecutor who led the state’s probe, says there was no confusion.
“His first obligation as a judge was to follow the law, and he intentionally failed to do that,” he says.
IN LATE MAY, Doyle perched in the bleachers of a stifling gymnasium at Waubonsee Community College and watched a procession of graduates march past. Toward the end of the line came Virginia Tribble, the golden tassel of an honors student draped around her neck.
Only 3 years ago, a crack addiction had reduced her to a scrawny, strung-out wraith. She squatted in vile drug houses, sold her body and abandoned her three children to chase cocaine’s mind-erasing high.
When a possession arrest brought her spree to an end, fellow inmates in the Kane County Jail warned her to stay away from Doyle. But she thrived on the court’s structure and grew close to the staff. She even called one of them for a ride home when people at a party began smoking pot.
She finished the program, reunited with her kids and got a job at a counseling center. And in that sweltering gym, as Doyle watched with a satisfied smile, she crossed the stage and accepted an associate’s degree in human services.
“I started crying when I saw him,” she said afterward, her once-hollow face full and radiant. “It really meant a lot because he supported me through all this. It made me really proud and happy to have him here.”
Doyle considers the success of people like Tribble, who recently earned her certification to become an addiction counselor, to be the ultimate vindication of the way he ran his drug court and, indeed, former defendants and their families are his fiercest advocates.
“If it was your child, your nephew, your niece, wouldn’t you want done whatever needed to be done?” asks Kathy Barkei of Batavia, who credits Doyle with reversing her daughter’s slide from Catholic school cheerleader to heroin-addicted thief. “He did what he had to do, and it worked for many, many people.”
Defense attorney Bruce Steinberg says he understood the allegiance of those who found sobriety in Doyle’s court. But he represented clients who felt tyrannized by the judge, and said their unhappy endings were equally valid.
To Steinberg, the allegations against Doyle couldn’t be dismissed as good intentions gone slightly awry. They were, he says, a rejection of the very heart of the American justice system–the impartial judge.
“Why stop at drug addiction?” he says. “Why not break the rules with DUI cases, rape cases, theft cases, white-collar crime cases? Where does it all end? It could go on until we have lost the system altogether.”
The jury will likely remain forever deadlocked on Judge Jim Doyle, a fate he finds difficult to accept. Before one audience after another, from local Boy Scouts to Romanian drug counselors, he still tries to make the case for his methods.
The effort can come across as quixotic, even desperate. One dazzling spring morning, he stood before a few dozen teens at Mooseheart, a home for children from troubled families, and showered them with statistics defending his program.
He pointed at his flip chart, wrinkled from frequent use. The chart showed Kane County felony charges decreasing as more people entered drug court. He displayed the sparkling report cards of some who had made it through. He took a pot shot at “regular probation,” saying his court’s success had threatened its caseload and budget.
The teens listened impassively until Doyle, in one electric moment, made a connection. He described a picnic the drug court had organized for defendants and their families, and how a swarm of children, their faces painted by a hired clown, had filled his heart with unexpected joy.
“When I was in the courtroom, I wasn’t thinking about that. I didn’t realize the number of children whose parents are in my drug court,” he says. “To see the little kids, to have them come up to you–little kids!–and say, ‘Judge, thank you for saving my mommy’s life . . .’ “
He paused to swallow hard. In that instant, it was easy to understand how a man would treasure such words. And it was easy to understand how far he might go to hear them.
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DO DOYLE’S CLAIMS OF SUCCESS ADD UP?
THE PRIME EVIDENCE Jim Doyle offers for his program’s success is a pair of line graphs tracing contrasting arcs.
One shows the number of participants soaring from a dozen in 2000 to 736 in 2004, Doyle’s last full year on the bench. The other shows Kane County felony cases plunging during the same period. Both trends reverse in 2005, when the judge was reassigned.
“It’s a direct opposite reaction,” he says. “When the numbers in treatment go down, crime goes back up.”
Critics, though, argue that the changes in felony caseloads were due primarily to a switch in the Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office. They say Meg Gorecki, who was elected top prosecutor in 2000, was less aggressive about bringing charges than her successor, John Barsanti, who took over in late 2004.
FBI statistics–which track all crimes that are reported, not just prosecuted–are equally inconclusive. Thefts and burglaries, offenses most closely related to drug addiction, fell in Kane County during Doyle’s tenure. But they also dropped in the rest of Illinois and nationwide.
Doyle says about 90 percent of those who completed his program were not arrested again. As his foes note, though, that figure could not be verified because the judge impounded case files to maintain the privacy of drug-court participants.
No one has tracked the long-term sobriety of defendants from Doyle’s court, but attorney Vince Solano says that among his clients, those who finished the program have had much more success staying clean than those who went through the regular legal system.
“The theory behind the court worked perfectly for anyone who was willing to donate the effort to it,” he says. –J.K.
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jkeilman@tribune.com
