A recently elected Cook County judge, Caroline Glennon-Goodman, was temporarily reassigned and referred to the state Judicial Inquiry Board Friday for allegedly sharing a racist image in a text message.
The image, which was leaked to the broader public last week, parodied a Little Tykes toy box with a picture of a Black child and a foot outfitted with “My First Ankle Monitor.” In a screenshot of the text obtained by Injustice Watch, Glennon-Goodman sent the image along with a text saying “My husband’s idea of Christmas humor.”
The image appears to be a screenshot of an AI-generated meme from a TikTok video.
Click to view the text message, which may be disturbing to some readers.
Following a meeting with the court’s executive committee, Chief Judge Timothy Evans issued an order Friday reassigning Glennon-Goodman from the pretrial division, where she was responsible for deciding whether defendants in criminal and domestic violence cases were jailed, confined to electronic monitoring, or released. The judge will also receive training on implicit bias and has been referred to the Judicial Inquiry Board, “to determine whether further sanction is warranted.”
Glennon-Goodman, who ran unopposed for her first term on the bench from the 10th Subcircuit last year, is a former career public defender. Neither Glennon-Goodman nor her husband responded to requests for comment.
A friend of the judge, who spoke to Injustice Watch on the condition of anonymity, said Glennon-Goodman told her the message was intended for a close friend and was instead mistakenly sent to a fellow judge with the same first name.
In a statement to Injustice Watch, the Cook County Bar Association, the region’s largest and oldest professional association of Black lawyers, condemned the circulation of the photo.
“It is our understanding that the photo was meant to be shared with a different audience and that the judge involved has apologized profusely as a result. Nevertheless, such media is inappropriate to share regardless of the intended audience,” the bar association said in the statement. “Discernment and judgment are of utmost importance for the qualifications of a judge. Any judge should be unbiased enough to not further circulate such a racist trope.”
The CCBA further noted, “The imagery recalls our nation’s history of inappropriate media images of Black people (such as blackface) and such imagery continues to shape the opinions of Black people, particularly Black men.”
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