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Rare Humility. Three years ago, Skolnick's committee began hearing rumors of conflicts of interest involving the Illinois Supreme Court. Last February, an anonymous tipster told Skolnick to check the stockholders of Chicago's Civic Center Bank & Trust Co. Sure enough, the name of Justice Klingbiel turned up. Skolnick also learned that Klingbiel was a stockholder in 1967, when the court exonerated the bank's general counsel, Theodore J. Isaacs, from charges of conspiring to defraud the state while serving as Illinois' director of revenue. Moreover, Klingbiel had written the majority decision.
Skolnick also claimed that Chief Justice Solfisburg had been serving secretly as counsel to the bank—a charge that was never substantiated. When the Illinois high court appointed a commission of leading lawyers to investigate his claims, Skolnick cried "whitewash," refused to cooperate, and was sentenced to four months in jail for contempt. He was hauled out of the courtroom in his wheelchair and loaded into a police van. He later assisted the commission, however, and the contempt order against him has just been dropped. With rare humility, Skolnick told the judge: "If I offended you, I apologize."
Skolnick's whitewash charge was wrong. Both Klingbiel and Solfisburg admitted to the commission that they had owned stock in the Civic Center Bank at the time they voted with the 4-to-2 court majority to clear Isaacs. The commission heard testimony that Klingbiel had accepted a gift of 100 shares transferred from Isaacs, and Solfisburg had bought 700 shares of Isaacs' stock at a cut rate while the case was before the court. Moreover, after voting to quash the indictment against Isaacs, the testimony indicated, Solfisburg began to sell the shares off at a 25% profit. Concluding that the incident had severely shaken public confidence in the court, the commission urged the two Republican judges to resign. Two days later, while publicly denying any wrongdoing, they did so.
Skolnick promises more revelations about other judges. "We have angles on top of angles," he says. Some people believe that his guerrilla war verges on neo-McCarthyism. Still, the state legislature's investigators have now requested financial reports from all 600 state judges in Illinois. The Chicago Bar Association has also called on the state to adopt the "Missouri Plan," under which all future state judges would be appointed by the Governor from lists of qualified candidates submitted by a non-partisan commission. However brash his tactics, Sherman Skolnick is one little man who may instigate real reforms.
*Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas broke his ties with the Parvin Foundation this year. Douglas was criticized for accepting consultant fees of $12,000 a year from the foundation, which Senator John Williams of Delaware claimed had links with Las Vegas gamblers.