It was a brief item–just two sentences, 53 words–on Page 16 of the Tribune on Saturday, Oct. 22. But for Jeanne Bishop it may as well have been the lead story on Page 1 of the big Sunday paper, because it involved her professional reputation.
“From now on whenever someone Googles my name, this is going to come up,” she said during a visit to my office on Monday. She pointed to a photocopy of the Oct. 22 item. The first of four items under the heading “Updates,” it read:
Attorney probed: The Cook County public defender’s office said Friday it is investigating whether public defender Jeanne Bishop acted improperly in trying to represent Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg at a hearing on his domestic battery charge. Circuit Judge Earl Hoffenberg asked Bishop to withdraw Thursday, saying public defenders only represent the indigent.
“I have never been investigated by my employer,” she said emphatically, “because I never did anything wrong.”
That she did nothing wrong is official. Her boss, Cook County Public Defender Edwin A. Burnette, has said as much publicly.
That she was never investigated is … well, a bit longer story, and one that demonstrates how ambiguous words can be, as well as the hazards of crunching complex matters down to fit tiny spaces in the newspaper.
Bishop was the public defender on duty when Steinberg, who was arrested in late September and charged with domestic battery after an altercation with his wife in their Northbrook home, was brought into Bond Court in Room 106 of the Skokie courthouse. Because Steinberg had no private attorney at that point, the public defender was assigned to represent him.
As Burnette explained in a letter to Tribune reporter Courtney Flynn, “Often our office is … appointed to represent in-custody defendants who appear in bond court without private counsel. Once appointed, this representation must continue until it is terminated by the court.”
In keeping with that obligation, Bishop appeared with Steinberg at his next court hearing, on Thursday, Oct. 20. However, she says she arrived “about 10 minutes late,” during which time this exchange occurred after the court clerk had called Steinberg’s case:
The court: Who is your attorney?
The defendant: There was some confusion about my attorney late yesterday, so I wasn’t able to get one. I was friends with the public defender. She was going to represent me, and late yesterday I was told she wasn’t.
Mr. Alpert (the assistant state’s attorney): I’d ask to pass this case. There are some issues in terms of attorneys, and I want to talk a little bit more with pretrial and the complaining witness.
The court: OK, we will pass it.
Later, after Bishop had arrived and the clerk called Steinberg’s case again, this is how the hearing began:
Ms. Bishop: Judge, we represented him at the bond court. Obviously if the case goes forward, Mr. Steinberg will be hiring a private attorney. We would seek leave to withdraw.
The court: I’d like you to withdraw right now. There is no reason for Mr. Steinberg to have a public defender representing him at this stage of the proceedings.
Ms. Bishop: That’s fine. We are seeking leave to withdraw.
Was Bishop “trying to represent” Steinberg at this hearing and proposing that, in the future, after he had hired a private attorney, the public defender “would seek leave to withdraw”? Or was she being formal in making an immediate request: “We would seek leave to withdraw”?
The judge’s reaction suggests he thought it was the former. So did Flynn, who was in the courtroom at the time, listening to the discussion.
In her conversation with me, Bishop said that Steinberg, in a voice-mail message, had asked her once–”as many of my clients do”–if she might possibly serve as his lawyer. She said she told him in response that that would be up to the judge to decide. She said she did not give the obvious answer–that Steinberg was not poor and thus couldn’t qualify for representation by the public defender–because she has learned from experience not to substitute her judgments about such matters for those of the judge.
As for those 53 words on Oct. 22, they were boiled down from 283 carefully chosen ones that Flynn filed and they included several that go to the heart of Bishop’s objections. These include:
- “is investigating.” Bishop says there was no investigation. Flynn said Xavier Velasco, chief of operations for the public defender’s office, repeatedly used the word “investigation” when she called him on Oct. 21, to ask about the propriety of Bishop’s actions. Velasco told me in a phone call on Monday that he spoke of “looking into” the propriety issue.
- “trying to represent.” Was Bishop stealthily trying to represent Steinberg that day or was she making a formal appearance to be dismissed from the case by the judge? I lean toward the latter. It’s noteworthy that, throughout this case, the only person who ever speaks of having Bishop as Steinberg’s lawyer, or for that matter, of Bishop being a friend, is Steinberg. They went to college together years ago, Bishop said, but she had not seen him since then until she was appointed to represent him in Bond Court.
- The judge “asked Bishop to withdraw.” If you believe her prior remark was not a sincere request to withdraw from the case, then yes, the judge’s remarks were a request. If it was a sincere request, then the judge’s remarks were gratuitous, an emphatic way of saying, “Motion granted.”
Mea culpa
At least one member of the Tribune Business staff took offense at my assertion in last week’s column that most economic news goes into the Business section because it is “narrow, abstruse and, to all but Alan Greenspan and his acolytes, pretty damn inscrutable.” In no way did I mean to imply the Business staff was less than adequate in translating economics into terms the lay reader can understand.
