A former Citibank wealth advisor who swindled nearly $1.5 million from elderly clients was sentenced to serve 2 ½ years in prison Wednesday after telling a federal judge she “fell short” in her duty to protect her clients. Helen Grace Caldwell, 59, who until 2021 was a vice president in the Michigan Avenue offices of Citibank, walked out of the federal courthouse following her sentencing hearing with orders to report on June 20 to begin her prison term. “The only difference between Ms. Caldwell and a bank robber is that she didn’t have a mask and a gun,” said the U.S. District Judge Matthew F ..read more

With scant competition and extraordinarily low turnout, the Cook County Democratic Party’s chosen candidates dominated the judicial races in Tuesday’s primary election. The party’s picks all seemed destined for victory Wednesday — most of them by substantial margins — after yet another historically uncompetitive primary in which all of the party’s slated candidates were already serving as judges. While more than 100,000 potential mail-in ballots were outstanding as of Tuesday night, the results in countywide races were clear shortly after the polls closed. In most of deep blue Cook County, wi ..read more

On a cold February day, Deidre Baumann walks down a quiet residential block in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side with a stack of campaign postcards in one hand and her leather purse filled with buttons in the other. She greets each passerby with a friendly but nervous smile, reminding them to vote for her in the upcoming primary election. At the behest of one resident, she pins a button onto his jacket with her name and fresh new slogan printed across: The Voice For Equal Justice. Baumann, 55, says she has door-knocked at least 100 times over her more than a decade long effort to ..read more

On the last Saturday in February, Griselda Vega Samuel set out with two volunteers to introduce herself to voters in the McKinley Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side of Chicago. She walked down the icy sidewalks of Western Avenue, past the 72-acre park that gives the neighborhood its name, then crossed under the large railroad bridge and emerged by a row of modest worker cottages, where she began knocking on doors. “My name is Griselda. I’m running for judge in this subcircuit,” Vega Samuel said quickly, in English or Spanish, when people cracked open their doors to the brisk chill of the ..read more

We printed 120,000 copies of our judicial election guide and are partnering with other newsrooms, community organizations, local businesses, and civic do-gooders to distribute them across Cook County. Our guide is included as an insert in: The Feb. 28 editions of the Wednesday Journal, the Riverside-Brookfield Landmark, the Forest Park Review, and the Austin Weekly News The Feb. 29 editions of the South Side Weekly and the Hyde Park Herald The March 7 edition of the Chicago Reader If you’re in the south suburbs, the Harvey World Herald is distributing 5,000 copies of our guide across Harve ..read more

When he announced his candidacy for Cook County judge, Chicago Police Lt. John D. Poulos touted the opportunity to “continue my public service, which spans 23 years.” It’s a career mired in controversy and allegations of dishonesty from the start, an Injustice Watch investigation shows. An analysis of thousands of documents from internal police investigations, lawsuits, and county and federal court records reveals a man whose credibility was repeatedly called into question — and a police department’s repeated failures to discipline him. Poulos’ tarnished track record includes two fatal shooti ..read more

Among the candidates for Cook County Circuit Court judge — mostly obscure outside courthouses and bar associations — Risa Lanier stands out. As second-in-command to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Lanier has been central to the operations of an office known for its progressive approach to justice and its fumbling of heater cases that exploded into scandals. Lanier has played pivotal roles in cases in which the conduct of prosecutors overshadowed the crimes they were prosecuting, from the incident involving actor Jussie Smollett to a high-profile failure to share evidence with defe ..read more

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Five years ago, Latinx politicians were a united front calling for diversity in the judiciary and lambasting then-Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke for appointing a white judge to a majority-Latinx Cook County subcircuit. In 2020, some of those politicians put their support behind Appellate Judge Jesse Reyes, who was the only Latinx candidate in a crowded field for a seat on the Illinois Supreme Court. Reyes’ pitch to voters was simple: It’s time for a Latinx justice on the state’s highest court. He came in second in a seven-way race. This year, with another of Cook County’s three sea ..read more

All 10 judicial candidates the Cook County Democratic Party establishment is working to get elected to countywide judicial vacancies this year are already judges. Most have deep legal experience and high bar ratings, but also the personal and political connections that have come to epitomize Cook County politics. The candidates slated by the Democrats are running as sitting judges thanks to an often-opaque process in which justices of the Illinois Supreme Court get to fill vacancies on a temporary basis. Most of the Illinois Supreme Court’s appointments came months before the election cycle b ..read more