Among the candidates for Cook County Circuit Court judge — mostly obscure outside courthouses and bar associations — Risa Lanier stands out.
As second-in-command to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Lanier has been central to the operations of an office known for its progressive approach to justice and its fumbling of heater cases that exploded into scandals.
Lanier has played pivotal roles in cases in which the conduct of prosecutors overshadowed the crimes they were prosecuting, from the incident involving actor Jussie Smollett to a high-profile failure to share evidence with defense lawyers. Other lawyers involved in those cases criticized her — along with Foxx and others in leadership posts — for lax oversight.
Lanier, 49, said voters should consider her whole 24-year career.
“As a prosecutor, I’ve had the same mission through three different state’s attorneys,” she told Injustice Watch. “No matter whose name was on the door, no matter who the elected official was, what has been important to me is the actual work, the actual impact that we have on the community, the actual impact that we have on public safety.”
Foxx defended her colleague — sometimes heatedly — in an interview with Injustice Watch, suggesting some criticism of Lanier comes from people motivated by grudges against Foxx and sometimes with racist or sexist overtones. The outgoing top prosecutor said voters should focus on the systemic reforms Lanier helped enact and major crimes she has prosecuted.
“I think she’s one of the finest attorneys that this office has produced,” Foxx said.
Some defense attorneys who know Lanier praised her legal ability. Attorney Jennifer Blagg said she’d met with Lanier several times.
“We don’t always see eye to eye on the outcome of a case, but I’ve always found her to be very prepared for meetings with me. She knows the facts of the case, very professional and responsive,” Blagg said.
A first-time candidate for the bench, Lanier sought the Cook County Democratic Party’s endorsement for a countywide position in August, but party leaders made her a ninth alternate — giving her virtually no chance of making the slate. People involved in the slating process said Lanier hurt her chances of getting endorsed by jumping in late, after party leaders had developed allegiances to candidates who started courting them earlier.
Now Lanier is running in the 19th Subcircuit, which includes suburbs such as Oak Lawn and Palos Hills and the South Side Chicago neighborhoods Mount Greenwood and Beverly, where Lanier lives. That swath of the city is home to many police officers and firefighters, who tend to support conservative candidates, and political observers told Injustice Watch a law and order candidate could find success there.
While Lanier is a career prosecutor, her reputation is tied to Foxx, who charted a new course by pulling back on prosecuting minor crimes, overturning hundreds of wrongful convictions, and calling for an end to cash bail — changes aimed at doing less harm to people of color. Foxx drew constant criticism from those who argued she should have come down harder on people accused of crimes.
Lanier’s campaign has highlighted her commitment to “a holistic approach” to public safety and her work punishing violence, including her successful prosecutions of defendants such as Shomari Legghette for the 2018 slaying of Chicago Police Cmdr. Paul Bauer and Diego Uribe for the murders of six family members in Gage Park in 2016.
Lanier is facing Beverly personal injury lawyer Bridget Colleen Duignan, who has endorsements from the Chicago Federation of Labor, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police and 19th Ward Ald. Matt O’Shea. Duignan had raised more than $200,000 as of early February, with more than half self-funded. Lanier and Duignan are endorsed by abortion-rights group Personal PAC.
Lanier, meanwhile, had raised about $38,000, with $29,000 self-funded.
A third candidate, former Oak Lawn Village President Dave Heilmann, is almost entirely self-funded.
Lanier, the stepdaughter of a police officer raised on the South Side, went to Rutgers Law School and immediately after graduating in 2000 joined the prosecutor’s office then run by Richard A. Devine. She prosecuted more than 100 misdemeanor and felony cases on her way up through the ranks to top leadership roles after Foxx took office in 2016. Lanier was the first Black woman to lead the criminal prosecutions division.
In 2021, Lanier was involved in a firestorm over a prosecutor’s statement in bond court about the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by a Chicago police officer.
The controversy erupted after Assistant State’s Attorney James V. Murphy III didn’t spell out how Toledo dropped the gun he was carrying just before the shooting. That sparked angry public criticism of Foxx’s office from those who saw the statement as justifying the killing.
Murphy faulted Lanier, then third-in-command, and other office leaders who he said did not offer guidance on what to say before the hearing, despite receiving videos of the shooting he did not have and an email describing the shooting in similar terms. Lanier confirmed to Injustice Watch she saw the email and videos of the shooting before the hearing, but Foxx and Lanier said she was not responsible for overseeing the bond court statement.
“This is a police shooting of a 13-year-old kid,” Murphy said. “How dare the administration not be up on that?”
Murphy’s lawyer later wrote in a letter to attorney disciplinary officials Murphy joined an online meeting with Lanier and other office leaders a few days after the hearing.
“(Lanier) stated that what the State’s Attorney’s Office was having a problem with were the ‘optics’ of the matter. She repeated that the S.A.O did not believe Mr. Murphy did anything wrong, that he was not in trouble, and that the S.A.O. was not ‘throwing him under the bus,’” the lawyer wrote.
The day after the meeting, Foxx put Murphy on leave, blaming him for failing to present all the facts.
Weeks later, Foxx apologized publicly for a “breakdown of communication” and brought Murphy back from leave, saying the prosecutor didn’t intend to suggest Toledo was holding the gun when he was shot. Then-second-in-command Jennifer Coleman was forced to resign after an internal investigation found she failed to oversee the statement. Foxx eventually appointed Lanier to replace her.
A probe by Illinois attorney disciplinary authorities cleared Murphy. He is now running for judge in the 10th Subcircuit.
Foxx placed responsibility for the statement on Coleman and Murphy.
In another case, Lanier penned a memo reporting a prosecutor’s alleged intimidation and insults to a witness — a document her office kept buried.
Nearly two years after the incident, Lanier and a colleague penned an internal 2019 memo exposed by the Chicago Tribune about Assistant State’s Attorney Nick Trutenko allegedly telling a reluctant witness in a murder case she disgusted him and threatening to charge her with perjury to get her to testify.
The memo described a cordial meeting in which Trutenko apologized.
“We impressed upon Nick that we cannot build trust and expect the public to cooperate with our office if we engage in such practices,” Lanier and her colleague wrote. They credited Trutenko with being honest and remorseful and told him the incident was a “teaching moment.”
Foxx’s office came under fire for not sharing the memo with the defense lawyers. One of those attorneys, Matt McQuaid, said Foxx violated rules about sharing evidence, and everyone in the prosecutor’s office involved with the memo shares responsibility.
Prosecutors also worked to avoid disclosing the memo in a second case involving Trutenko, prompting Judge William Hooks to blast Foxx’s office for “a practice of hiding materials relative to bad prosecutors,” according to a transcript.
McQuaid sought Lanier’s testimony before her office settled the matter by offering the defendants a plea deal the judge described as so favorable it was unfair, the Chicago Tribune wrote. McQuaid told Injustice Watch he thinks prosecutors agreed to the deal to avoid Lanier’s testimony about the memo.
Trutenko, meanwhile, has been charged with perjury in relation to his testimony about a witness in a different case.
Lanier and Foxx said the handling of the memo was not Lanier’s responsibility. Foxx dismissed the suggestion the memo led to the plea deal, and she said prosecutors’ reluctance to share the memo in the second case had to do with questions about its relevance, not a desire to hide it.
Part of Lanier’s supervisory work has been overseeing the unit established to review claims of wrongful convictions, which has been in upheaval over personnel issues. The previous head of that division, Nancy Adduci, departed late last year following accusations from defense lawyers she hid evidence from them in a murder case. Foxx declined to offer details on her exit.
The office’s new leader, Michelle Mbekeani, recently faced pointed criticism from Cook County Judge Michael McHale, who removed her from a case and banned her from his courtroom after accusing her of giving “duplicitous” answers to his questions about an alleged conflict of interest. The alleged conflict stems from Mbekeani’s involvement with a website designed to set up imprisoned people with lawyers. Mbekeani told the judge the website was for a business school project and took in no money. The judge said the situation “reeks of impropriety.”
Lanier briefly spoke on her office’s behalf at the hearing, backing Mbekeani.
“It was our understanding that this is, indeed, a class project,” she said.
Foxx said McHale was “wrong on the law; period.”
Some legal ethics experts agree.
“This is not a conflict of interest,” wrote professor Ellen Yaroshefsky of Hofstra University in New York in an email to Injustice Watch. “The prosecutor is not the lawyer for the police or the victims. A project to assist defendants in finding lawyers to represent them is not only worthy but should be applauded.”
Lanier declined to comment on Adduci and Mbekeani, and Foxx said it was her decision to keep Mbekeani in the role, not Lanier’s.
Lanier also prosecuted the enduringly divisive Smollett case, and in 2019, she dropped charges that the actor staged a fake hate crime against himself. She noted she dropped them in consultation with her supervisor and in exchange for the actor doing community service and forfeiting the $10,000 he posted for bond. The office’s treatment of the actor sparked an international furor and the appointment of a special prosecutor who criticized Foxx’s office, filed new charges, and won a conviction in 2021.
Lanier didn’t answer directly when asked whether she thought dropping the charges was right, but she said she has always brought integrity and careful thought to decisions like that one.
“It was one of those experiences that you do grow from, that you do learn from, and that you do have an opportunity to self-reflect,” she said.
“I’m really proud of all of the work that we have done in this office,” Foxx told Injustice Watch. “I am confounded, confounded, why this story for five years now — it’s been five years — will overshadow anything that this woman has done.”
Senior reporter David Jackson contributed to this report.
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