Candidate debate exposes differences

WAUKEGAN — The Republican Lake County state’s attorney and circuit clerk on Tuesday defended their first terms in office — marked by one cleaning house and the other keeping house.

Their respective Democratic challengers accused the Republican incumbents of not going far enough with reforms they promised in their 2012 campaigns and for creating a harmful culture for employees.

Lake County State’s Attorney Michael G. Nerheim touted reforms for his office — like forming a review panel consisting of former judges and prosecutors to review the integrity of prior convictions — in the wake of several wrongful convictions in the office’s past.

“We’re trying to get people out of the system before they’re even in the system in the first place,” Nerheim said, referring to the number of diversion initiatives he started. “We put that in place. That doesn’t sound like a culture of conviction.”

However, Matthew J. Stanton, the Democratic challenger and a partner at the Gurnee-based Stanton & Wharton LLC, asserted the office under Nerheim’s leadership has not moved past its “culture of conviction.” He indicated the 2nd District Appellate Court is dismissing wrongful convictions not only from former state’s attorney Michael J. Waller’s tenure, but also ones stemming from Nerheim’s term.

“Bad prosecutions continue, and this is because the state’s attorney’s office is a holdover from previous administrations that refuse to dismiss cases in the face of clear evidence of innocence,” Stanton said.

The comments from Nerheim and Stanton came as part of a candidates’ forum hosted by the Lake County Bar Association at the Glen Flora Country Club in Waukegan.

Daily Law Bulletin Editor Marc Karlinsky moderated the forum before a full dining room.

Employees of both the circuit clerk’s office and the state’s attorney’s office were present in the audience.

In general, the Republican incumbents claimed the reforms they had implemented had turned their respective offices — and Lake County as a whole — into models for others.

Lake County has a history of wrongful convictions. Prominent among them is the case of Juan Rivera, who was first convicted in 1993 for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. He was imprisoned for 20 years until DNA testing exonerated him in 2011; Nerheim dismissed the charges against him.

Rivera sued the city of Waukegan, Lake County and other municipalities. The suit ended in a $20 million settlement.

Stanton criticized Nerheim for not firing assistant state’s attorneys linked to the wrongful convictions after he was elected promising he would meet and interview each office employee.

In response, Nerheim noted that some employees have either retired or become judges and said leadership “is not about firing people.”

Stanton said, if elected, he would review every employee in the state’s attorney’s office within the first 30 days of his term.

Meanwhile, Lake County Circuit Clerk Keith S. Brin touted the progress his office has made toward electronic filing. He said the office got off to a slow start, but added that the county will have e-filing for all types of civil cases by the end of 2016.

This would bring the county into compliance with a Jan. 22 Illinois Supreme Court order that makes e-filing in civil cases mandatory in all circuit courts by Jan. 1, 2018.

However, Erin E. Cartwright, a former prosecutor and a family law practitioner in Gurnee, slammed Brin for spending $5.7 million on a computer system that was not set up to be a case management system. Cartwright is listed on the ballot and campaigning as Erin Cartwright Weinstein.

A source of contention between Cartwright Weinstein and Brin was Brin’s decision to challenge a unionization effort by employees and other lawsuits challenging fired employee’s unemployment benefits.

Brin defended his actions and said the people involved in the litigation stood against his efforts to modernize the office.

“You all cried out for modernization and you cried out for extending services, and we did that,” Brin said.

Brin accused members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 of intimidating circuit clerk employees into agreeing to unionize.

The fight ultimately ended up before 2nd District Appellate Court, which rejected Brin’s allegations of fraud and coercion against the union in August. Earlier this week, Brin’s office announced it would not pursue an appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court.

At the forum, Brin said he accepted the panel’s decision and would begin to negotiate with the union.

However, Cartwright Weinstein pointed out that AFSCME has filed complaints of workplace retaliation against Brin with the Illinois Labor Relations Board.

Brin repeated during several remarks that the office has reduced its budget by 20 percent since he took office.

Cartwright Weinstein disputed the claim, asserting these savings came from a budget trick. She said Brin is not counting money from a separate fund the circuit clerk’s office maintains known as the document storage fund.

The county’s current budget for fiscal year 2016 — which ends Nov. 30 — shows that the document storage fund is set to spend $578,433 this year, a 64 percent decrease from fiscal year 2015’s modified budget.

But a review of the circuit clerk’s office operating expenses since Brin’s election in 2012 showed that the office itself spent a consistent amount of money each fiscal year.

In fiscal years 2013 and 2014, Brin’s office was approved to spend $9.2 million and $9.4 million, respectively; in reality, his office spent only $8.7 million and $8.8 million those years.

In fiscal year 2015, his office was approved to spend $9.3 million; in the current fiscal year, he is set to spend $8.8 million.

There were some common ground reached between the circuit clerk candidates and the state’s attorney candidates.

Both Brin and Cartwright Weinstein agreed to the necessity of adopting e-filing as quickly as possible. The Democratic challenger, however, said Brin was going about it in a drawn-out way that is costing taxpayers money.

Stanton and Nerheim also struck similar tones regarding the need of the state’s attorney to address crime in a preventive maner.