By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]

CHICAGO — The jury that will determine the fate of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is nearly complete after three slow days of jury selection this week. 

But in addition to the 11 jurors who have already been chosen, one final jury member must survive challenges, plus six alternates — a larger number than other recent federal corruption trials, owing to the length of Madigan’s.

U.S. District Judge Robert Blakey has repeatedly told the attorneys they should take whatever time they need. But he has also warned the pace would delay the trial one week beyond its original 10-week schedule. On Friday, Blakey and the attorneys agreed that opening statements would be pushed to Monday, Oct. 21.

So far, the jury pool has been overwhelmingly white, though the jurors selected are a more diverse group of eight women and three men. The jury so far includes a teacher, an Amazon warehouse worker, an overnight nurse and a Goodwill donation center employee.

The Goodwill employee, who was chosen Friday, told attorneys she’s considering moving out of Illinois because she didn’t want to continue raising her son in Chicago due to violence and the cost of living. 

The jury will also include a woman who said that when she told her best friend about her jury summons, the friend predicted that she was being called for the Madigan case — and told her to “vote guilty” for the former Democratic House speaker. 

“She’s a Trumper,” the juror said of her friend, referring to her support for former President Donald Trump. “She really hates all Democrats except me, maybe.”

Throughout the hours of questioning, Madigan has been seated at the head of his defense table in Blakey’s wood-paneled courtroom, taking notes on a yellow legal pad and occasionally conferring with his five attorneys.

Most of the time, the former speaker has remained stone-faced even as others in the courtroom have laughed during lighter moments of questioning.

But he did laugh when a woman who was later seated on the jury told his attorney Tom Breen that he looked like the actor Eric Roberts, and when a prospective juror said the 82-year-old politician didn’t look his age.

That juror, an Air Force veteran who works in health care, had indicated that he didn’t believe politicians should stay in office for life, though he told Breen that he wouldn’t hold Madigan’s five-decade tenure as an elected official against him if selected – though hours later he was nixed.

“But as you look at him right now, you don’t think he’d be too old or out of step?” Breen asked.

“No, he looks young,” the juror replied, to which Madigan smiled and waved across the courtroom as attorneys and observers alike erupted laughter.

“Wow, the jury’s very complimentary, isn’t it?” Blakey noted later.

The former speaker has appeared in Blakey’s courtroom several times this year for pretrial hearings, though his co-defendant only made his first in-person appearance this week.

Longtime Statehouse lobbyist Mike McClain had appeared via videoconference at those hearings from his home in Quincy, though he is no stranger to the Dirksen Federal Courthouse. Five floors above Blakey’s courtroom, another jury last year convicted McClain and three others affiliated with electric utility Commonwealth Edison for bribing Madigan. 

McClain and Madigan, who were for decades close friends, have largely avoided each other in the courtroom this week, although after proceedings broke for the long weekend on Friday afternoon the men shook hands and exchanged words. McClain spent the first three days in court taking only occasional notes on prospective jurors at a separate defense table from his co-defendant, flanked by his own four attorneys.

Prosecutors and attorneys for Madigan and McClain have already agreed to dismiss dozens of prospective jurors based on their answers to a lengthy questionnaire they filled out earlier this week. Many of those dismissals were made because the jurors couldn’t commit to the full trial, though a number of them were nixed because their questionnaire answers expressed animus toward politicians in general or Madigan in particular.

While some prospective jurors who made it to the questioning in the courtroom had heard of Madigan or remembered seeing something about the charges in the news, many had never heard his name. 

One juror told attorneys that he’d grown up in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood and was even familiar with a parking lot that will factor into the trial when prosecutors present evidence about a proposed hotel project in that neighborhood. Prosecutors allege Madigan improperly accepted former Chicago Ald. Danny Solis’ offer to direct property tax work for the project to Madigan’s law firm in exchange for an appointment on a state board for Solis, though neither the appointment nor the hotel project ever panned out.

On his questionnaire, the potential juror also wrote the words “scandal” and “fraud” in association with Madigan and said that he’d remembered a history teacher in high school speaking negatively about the former speaker, though he claimed to be “neutral” about Madigan now. 

After 45 minutes of questioning, Blakey ultimately booted the potential juror, siding with defense attorneys’ concerns about his preconceived notions.

Though some prospective jurors who were questioned in the courtroom said they were casual consumers of news, many expressed apathy or even disinterest about current events and politics. Others were unclear on the concept of lobbying and believed it to be illegal.

Before the jury selection process began on Wednesday, the parties earlier this week revealed for the first time that Democratic political consultant Alaina Hampton would be testifying during trial. In early 2018, Hampton publicly accused Madigan of failing to protect her from sexual harassment she experienced within the speaker’s political organization — the first in what would become many cracks in Madigan’s power structure.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.