State Board to Decide if Cook County Judge is Mentally Competent to Sit

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It’s a first for the state commission now that they must determine whether a Cook County judge is fit to remain a sitting judge after having a bipolar breakdown during court and afterwards. Judge Cynthia Brim, 54, who has been hospitalized six times for bipolar since 1993, incidentally let her personal struggle interfere with her job on March 8, 2012, when she interrupted hearing a traffic call at Markham courthouse, first with silence, then to announce that her grandmother had been raped by a white man, and that the South Holland and Evergreen Park police departments were targeting blacks and Hispanics, and that “justice is all about if you’re black and white.” So read the complaint brought against her, filed Monday by the Judicial Inquiry board, that alleges conduct that was “prejudicial to the administration of justice and that brought the judicial office into disrepute.”

As the Chicago Tribune also reported, she is charged with “being mentally unable to perform her duties unless she receives regular treatment, including consistently taking necessary and appropriate medication.”

  

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The upset at the court house was followed by a 5-mile “march for justice” at which point the judge threw her courthouse keys and shoved a deputy who tried to stop her. She was found guilty but legally insane February for shoving the deputy.

The judicial board that ill review her ability to go on being a judge who makes $182,000 yearly by representing justice will include an Illinois Supreme Court justice, two appellate court justices, two circuit judges, and two citizens, according to John Gall, an attorney for the Judicial Inquiry Board.

In the last 41 years there has never been any complaints that clearly involved mental illness of this sort, and in this regard, Brim’s case is a unique situation for the panel to decide, that might set some precedent.