Horse-trading in court

You gotta love Judge Mahoney over in Rockford. He's the judge who is hearing the Federal case of Seipler v. Cundiff et al., the December 15th transcript of which has finally attracted the attention of the Northwest Herald.

Cal Skinner has been publishing portions of it for almost a week.

If you don't chuckle at the back-and-forth that is going on that courtroom, you'll need to take more "silly" pills.

The need to complete depositions is obvious. For example, in Part 7 today on www.mchenrycountyblog.com/ the incomplete deposition of Dr. Meyer, a psychologist who does many evaluations for McHenry County court cases and who is a friend of and contributor to Sheriff Keith Nygren was taken several months ago, comes to light. The judge had apparently assigned four hours for that deposition, and the associate from the office of the sheriff's lawyer, James Sotos, used up 3 1/2 hours of the four.

Zane's lawyer wanted 1 1/2 hours with Dr. Meyer, and the judge gave him an hour.

That's a recurring theme through the hearing. The lawyers ask for more time; the judge gives less. This is, of course, a lesson that we should all learn. You always ask for more and expect to bargain (i.e., "negotiate" or, as with a judge, accept what you are handed). But ask for more...

You'll see frequent references to the "Monell theory". What's that? For a lot of information, go to http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Jan/1/128567.html It looks to me like "failure (of government) to train (properly) as a theory for establishing governmental entity liability".

It wasn't long ago that I was told that deputies in rollcall were told to "just mark everybody down as White." Now there's a novel way to avoid racial profiling. And now it looks like that's exactly what was happening. Is it Deputy Bruketta who is said to have written at least 140 tickets to Hispanic drivers who miraculously became White (Caucasian) on their tickets?

And what about all those tickets that were not prosecuted? The Sheriff's Department "found" a second list, after the first one was produced during discovery. Should every ticket written in the last four years be audited and accounted for?

At what point should a sitting Sheriff be removed from office? Nygren is the one who said he investigated racial profiling and it wasn't occurring. The problem with removing him is that then he gets to sit in Florida in the sun and still draw his paycheck while the fight goes on. Maybe a starting punishment is to force him to hang around McHenry County during the dead (oops; Freudian slip?) of winter.