Jury’s in, and so is Evans — Victorious veteran chief judge isn’t planning to go anywhere

Minutes after extending his record tenure by being reelected to a seventh term as Cook County’s chief judge, Timothy Evans had news for anyone who thinks he ought to be calling it a career.

Asked about his opponent Lorna Propes’ call for term limits on the chief judge position, Evans invoked the example of lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court as his model for judicial tenure.

“They don’t have term limits there, and the reason they don’t is because they value experience and tenacity and capability. Why would anyone want to see that opportunity removed by an automatic prospect like term limits?” said the 76-year-old Evans, invoking this week’s visit to Chicago by 86-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“We have a Supreme Court of the United States where the average age is approaching 90 now,” Evans told reporters.

Actually, the average age of the current court is more like 67, but nobody wanted to stop Evans when he was on a roll.

Confusion on that score aside, Evans was clear about the most important point from Thursday’s results: a majority of his colleagues seemed to agree with his opposition to term limits, at least if it meant ousting him.

They voted 143 to 102 to give Evans another three-year term overseeing one of the most important offices in county government.

The chief judge commands a budget of $272 million and 2,400 employees. That doesn’t include the 400 judges whose courtroom assignments the chief judge controls.

Evans went on the bench in 1992 and was first elected to the chief judge role in 2001.

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Before Evans, no Cook County chief judge had served longer than 16 years at the helm.

It was the second election in a row in which Evans faced a tough challenge that in the end resulted in a comfortable margin of victory.

Thursday’s result wasn’t even as close as in 2016, when Evans turned back a bid to replace him by Tom Allen, a former Chicago alderman like himself, on a vote of 129 to 103.

Propes, 74, had sought to build on the lingering discontentment with Evans’ leadership that surfaced in the 2016 contest, arguing he had stayed in the job too long, causing “complacency and bureaucratic inertia.”

Afterward, she congratulated Evans on his victory and said she looked forward to returning to the “job I love” as a courtroom judge but couldn’t hide her disappointment.

She said the election had offered a clear choice.

“I’m for change. Judge Evans is for the same,” said Propes, who had promised to limit chief judges to a pair of three-year terms.

Mark Brown/Chicago Sun-Times

When a reporter asked her if she was at least heartened by the vote margin, Propes offered a pained smiled.

“No, I was not. I thought we were in the game,” she said.

But Propes knew going into the election that unseating an incumbent would be difficult.

“This is a human system. Everybody knows Judge Evans. He’s given them all their assignments. They like him. They feel, you know, a little bit of allegiance to him for his relationships with them. That’s human nature. Is it hard for a challenger? Sure, it is,” she said.

Mark Brown/Chicago Sun-Times

Evans said he offered to work with Propes to see if they could make some of the changes she proposed, and Propes told reporters “I really hope it works out that way.”

But in addition to rejecting her term limits proposal, he also pushed back against her pledge to more aggressively defend judges against efforts to remove them from office via retention votes. He said the judicial canon of ethics precludes him taking a more active role in such campaigns.

The mild-mannered Evans, the first African American to serve as chief judge, is a well-known commodity in Chicago politics. He served as Mayor Harold Washington’s floor leader on the City Council and later ran unsuccessfully for mayor after Washington’s death.

Jerry Tomaselli/Chicago Sun-Times

The vote was conducted behind closed doors at the Daley Center in the room where Cook County residents report for jury duty.

The county’s current roster of 254 full circuit judges was eligible to vote by secret paper ballot. Associate judges, who are elected by fellow judges instead of the public, don’t get to vote for chief judge.

The secret ballot process only makes sense to me. If you had to publicly vote for your boss, how independent could you be?

But they might want to rethink closing the room during the nominating speeches and for the announcement of the vote.

It would help demystify the process, and as changes go, it’s not exactly term limits.