Did Judge Hooks Clap-Out Crap Out?

What judges lined up to honor the career of Judge William Hooks in his exit from the Cook County criminal courts?

Who honored retiring Judge William Hooks in his exit as a Cook County judge?

The question emerges again in the wake of a flyer passed around the Criminal Court Building at 26th and California asking for a “clap-out” for retiring Judge William Hooks on June 26. Clap-outs are spontaneous events for retiring judges or prosecutors where colleagues line up to applaud the retiring member.

Not too many attorneys from 26th and California can recall an instance in which supporters of a judge would actually request a clap-out in a flyer.

Judge Hooks had a unique status at the time of his retirement. He had been assigned to “restricted duties or duties other than judicial duties” for allegations that he had made racist comments about Arab Americans on the bench, as well as engaged in witness interference and tampering, according to media reports. Chief Judge Timothy Evans made a special order authorizing an investigation by the Judicial Inquiry Board (JIB) to review the allegations.

“Middle Eastern men are also controlling and abusive. . . . I would shoot and kill men like that from Middle Eastern countries,” Hooks was accused of saying.

The timing of Hooks’s retirement is interesting in light of a few other facts. For one, judges were granted a cost-of-living pay increase on July 1. Hooks’s official retirement date is July 5, so he would benefit from the raise. A meeting of the Judicial Inquiry Board was scheduled for just a few weeks after his retirement. With his exit from the bench, there will be no ruling against Hooks, and the findings of the investigation by JIB will not likely become public, according to sources familiar with the process—those sources can draw their own conclusions about the timing of Hooks’s retirement.

Given the controversy surrounding the allegations against Hooks and the investigation underway, a clap-out by judges to a colleague wearing their robes might not have been such a good look for the judges, for whom allegations of racism against  police officers has initiated judicial rulings in which convicted killers and rapists have been set free from prison.

Which is not to say that Hooks should be denied a ceremony honoring his legacy as a jurist. Given his record, it might be a good time to point out just who the most appropriate members of the public and legal community would be to honor him.

With this in mind, the head of his honor roll lineup is a no-brainer. It should be filled by none other than Jackie Wilson, in many ways the most shining icon of contemporary Chicago justice and in the minds of many Chicagoans, particularly cops, the most illuminating example of Judge Hooks’s legacy.

For it was Hooks who presided over the third criminal trial of Jackie Wilson for his role in the 1982 murder of two policemen on the South Side of Chicago. And this criminal case spearheaded the “wrongful conviction” movement in Chicago, which signified that no convicted killer, no matter how depraved his crime, should lose hope of getting out of prison in Chicago.

Supporters of Wilson could not have garnered a better judge to pave the rocky road that would legally vindicate Wilson for his role in the execution-style killing of the two officers at a traffic stop during a month-long period in 1982 in which five officers were gunned down by offenders, four fatally.

When the case just happened to land in Hooks’s courtroom, cops and attorneys threw up their hands, believing that Wilson’s path to freedom was all but guaranteed in the courtroom of such a notoriously biased judge as Hooks. They were right. A trial that revealed more than any other the utter breakdown of the criminal justice system in Chicago, it also culminated not only in Wilson’s freedom, but also two career prosecutors, Andrew Horvat and Nick Trutenko, being fired through the machinations of Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx. Afterward, the two former prosecutors faced criminal charges for their role in the trial.

These prosecutors, who spent so much of their lives defending and protecting the innocent, were granted no honorable exit from the 26th and California courthouse, no clap-out at the end of their careers, only a lonely, unjust firing at the hands of one of the most corrupt prosecutors in the country.

So what if Wilson was accused of beating up a woman after he got out? He nevertheless filed his obligatory lawsuit against detectives, prosecutors, and a host of other public servants, a lawsuit given life after the circus that took shape in Hooks’s courtroom.

Next in line for Hooks’s clap-out would be Kimberly Foxx, herself soon to be exiting her role as top prosecutor. (One wonders who will show up for her clap-out.) Hooks would have to pause for a while in passing Foxx, the two of them perhaps chatting pleasantly about all the rapists and killers set free after Foxx took control of the prosecutor’s office and pawned it off to the anti-police movement.

“You the man,” Foxx could say to Hooks after recounting the long list of offenders she set free, even when her top prosecutors said they were guilty and her predecessor Anita Alvarez refused to honor their depraved and false innocence claims.

Next in line should be the exoneration attorneys, whose pathetic legal theories turning cops into criminals and murderers into folk heroes find life and agreement in the Barnum Bailey courtrooms of jurists like Judge Hooks.

After them would be the “journalists” of Chicago, for whom repeating the stories of these exoneration advocates without a hint of suspicion or real investigation is the hallmark of the activist journalism that began in Chicago and has now spread, like a cancer, to the rest of the country, leaving Americans incredulous to every word uttered by the narcissistic press. Just as they preen and suck up to their radical exoneration overseers, so too could they purr obsequiously to Hooks as he saunters down the clap-out line, relishing in the attention of journalists who have turned the media, as Hooks as done to the law, into a form of activism.

For the prosecutors and judges still remaining in the sordid wasteland of the Chicago criminal courts, any applause for Hooks would hold a high degree of ambiguity. Were they, in their heart of hearts, applauding Hooks’s career or his exit?