Judge Kinney retires

JOLIET – After 20 years as a Will County judge, Gerald Kinney’s future plans are ... nothing.

“Hopefully, I’ll enjoy being retired. I’ve been working ever since I was delivering The Herald-News when I was 11 years old,” said Kinney, who stepped down from the bench Friday.

He leaves after presiding over the Hickory Street murder cases, in which two of the defendants have been sentenced to life in prison.

Kinney attended St. Patrick’s Grade School, Joliet West High School and Joliet Junior College. He expected to teach at Southern Illinois University after he received a degree there in history and government, but he was advised to pursue law school.

“[Law] was just something I was always interested in. Maybe it’s my Irish-Catholic background,” he said. Kinney put himself through Loyola University in Chicago by returning each evening to sell cars at his uncle Ray Kinney’s Joliet dealership.

Among Kinney's final trials were those involving the Hickory Street slayings from 2013. He accepted a plea deal from one defendant and found two others guilty of murder after separate bench trials. Last week, Kinney assigned the remaining suspect's case to another judge for trial next year.

“I told the chief judge I’d do the best I could to resolve them all, and it’s still not two years [past],” Kinney said. “I’ve never wanted anyone to sit in jail awaiting trial for a long period of time, whether the outcome is prison or freedom.”

Kinney said he impounded records and kept attorneys and investigators from discussing the case publicly to "limit the sensationalism" around it, and felt his gag order was an effective way to do so. It remains in effect until the final case is resolved, unless the new judge feels differently, he said.

After being admitted to the bar in 1975, Kinney spent nine years with the firm that is now Spesia and Ayers, and 10 years with Garrison, Fabrizio and Hanson. Kinney mostly handled civil matters in private practice, but the judge believes the greatest challenge in those cases also applies to criminal lawyers.

“The biggest problem is maintaining a line of communication. Your client has to know you’re there doing what you can, and you need them to provide information to you. It’s an acquired skill. It takes a while to master that,” Kinney said.

Kinney had applied to be an associate judge before he was offered a circuit vacancy in 1994. He served as chief judge from 2009 to 2013 and described his time on the bench as “a dream job.”

“[You have] stature in the community. You get to help people get out of ‘the system’ and make sure people who shouldn’t be in the community are kept away,” he said.

The hardest parts of being a judge were watching people “wreck their lives” by returning to his courtroom over and over on different cases, and sometimes sentencing young people to serious prison time.

“Not for cases of significant violence, but for DUI or reckless homicide where one mistake had serious consequences,” Kinney said.

To balance such cases a judge “has to see the humor in the everyday cases,” he said.

He recalled a memorable hearing where he questioned why a misdemeanor battery charge was going to be raised to a felony.

“The defendant’s attorney had consistently argued prosecutors couldn’t show that his client was present at the scene of the crime or had any connection to the victim,” Kinney said.

“So I did my due diligence and read the complaint. When I read the [felony resulted because] the victim was handicapped, and the defendant told the court, ‘Yeah. She had one arm.’ ”