Can My Case Be Transferred to a Different Courtroom or Judge? Combs Waterkotte attorneys Christopher Combs and Joshua Boardman discuss everything you need to know about Illinois sex crime charges, including sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape, and more.
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Interview Transcript
Scott Michael Dunn: Can my sex crime case be transferred to a different courtroom or go before a different judge?
Joshua Boardman: Yes, so under the law there are change of judge procedures. And those are based on statutory factors. I mean that could be based on bias or actual conflicts of interest or things like that. So part of our job is obviously to understand which judge we’re before and determine whether there needs to be change of judge based on any of those circumstances. But, yes, to answer your question simply, yes, judges can be changed throughout the process or sometimes different judges are assigned, what have you.
Dunn: And courtroom, what’s the significance of different courtrooms? If it’s changed, is that just based upon the judge or is there something specific about that?
Boardman: There’s really nothing specific about it. Yes, often times the courtrooms are pretty uniform. It just depends on which judge’s courtroom that you’re in front of, which judge is going to hear that case. So Illinois doesn’t follow the same sort of associate circuit or circuit court level that even like a neighboring state like Missouri has whereas in Missouri you’ve got associate circuit and then it gets bound over to circuit court. And many times in Illinois, especially in rural counties, the same judge will hear a case through the detention hearing all the way and will be the trial judge at the end.
