Robert Thomas
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Robert R. Thomas is an associate justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, a position to which he was elected in 2000. He has also served as the court's chief justice.
Justices of the Illinois Supreme Court are elected to serve ten-year terms in partisan elections; Thomas serves as a Republican. His current term expires in 2010.
Biography
Robert R. Thomas was born on August 7,1952, in Rochester, NY. He received his B.A. degree in Government from the University of Notre Dame in 1974, and was named an Academic All-American in that same year. He went on to have a 10-year career as a kicker in the National Football League with the Chicago Bears. He received his J.D. degree from Loyola University School of Law in 1981.
Legal career
Judge Thomas was elected Circuit Court Judge in DuPage County in 1988. There, he presided over civil jury trials and was the Acting Chief Judge from 1989 to 1994. In 1994, Judge Thomas was elected to the Appellate Court Second District. On December 4, 2000, Justice Thomas was sworn in as the Illinois Supreme Court Justice for the Second District. In April 1996, Justice Thomas was inducted into the Academic All-American Hall of Fame, and in January 1999, he received the prestigious NCAA Silver Anniversary Award. Justice Thomas is a member of the DuPage County Bar Association.
Defamation of character lawsuit
In 2007, Justice Thomas was awarded $7 million in a successful defamation of character lawsuit against Bill Page, a former columnist at the Kane County Chronicle. The justice's lawyers alleged that Mr. Page had essentially accused him of official misconduct, a felony, when he wrote in his column that he had traded his vote on a disciplinary case in exchange for political support for his favored candidate in a local judicial race. The case was significant because it prompted an Illinois appellate court to establish a judicial privilege in Illinois, allowing judicial deliberations to be kept private, much like doctor-patient discussions.[1]
The jury award was subsequently lowered by the trial judge to $4 million [2]. Bill Page and Shaw Suburban Media Group, Inc. countersued in U.S. District Court in June of 2007 [3].
On the issues
On Criminal Justice
- Justice Thomas concurred in the majority opinion, written by Justice Lloyd Karmeier, over the vigorous and lenghty dissent of Justice Charles Freeman (in which justice Thomas Kilbride and Justice McMorrow joined), which concluded amongst other things, that although a judge cannnot defer to a sheriff's department in allowing all criminal defendants to be wired with electronic stun belts, and although stun belts are only warranted where a manifest need is shown, the wiring criminal defendants with electronic stun belts during their trials did not, on its own, violate the defendants due process rights, or rights to a fair trial.
On Negligence
- Justice Thomas concurred in the majority opinion, written by Justice Rita Garman, over the vigorous and lengthy dissent of Justice McMorrow, in which Justice Charles Freeman joined concluded that, where a driver errantly drover her vehicle over the sidewalk and into a Burger King restaraunt, causing the death of a patron sitting in the restaruant, Burger King owed a legal duty to that patron to protect him. In doing so, the Court abandoned the opposite precedent, which had been established in Illinois in Stutz v. Kamm (1990) (Court refused to impose premises liability where a driver had driven through a wall and into a waiting room because the injury was unforeseeable); and Simmons v. Aldi-Brenner Co. (1987) (storekeeper and owners had no duty to protect customers against injury caused by driving automobile through storefront)
On Property Rights
- Justice Thomas concurred in the majority opinion, written by Justice Rita Garman, in a case where Chicago Alderman Charles Bernardini proposed a zoning change to prohibit the construction of the plaintiff's apartment building after plaintiff had already begun construction of the apartment building, and that zoning change became effective the following month, established two rules: (1) that a property owner has a vested right to continue building, or in the alternative is entitled to compensation, if the property owner made substantial expenditures prior to the indroduction of a later-passed zoning ordinance that would otherwise prohibit such building; and (2) that a property owner's investments in development are at his own peril once an amendment that would prohibit his development has been officially proposed.
