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Anti-Adoption Judge Overruled
NewsPlanet Staff
Wednesday, June 2, 1999 / 05:58 PM

SUMMARY: A judge who went so far as to name a religious right group a guardian to the children in 2 lesbian adoption cases is called a discredit to the judiciary by an appeals panel.

A renegade Cook County Circuit judge's efforts to block second-parent adoptions by two lesbian couples were emphatically rejected in a unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the First District Illinois Appellate Court on June 1. Within minutes of hearing oral arguments, the panel not only granted the adoptions but apologized to the parents and criticized the judge's behavior in the strongest terms. A written opinion will follow. The couples, CMW & LAW and MM & JS, were represented in their appeal by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund with cooperating attorney Rosemary Mulryan; supporting briefs were filed by the Chicago Council of Lawyers as well as the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association.

Hundreds of Illinois gays and lesbians have been allowed to co-adopt their partners' biological children since 1995, in a manner which has become quite routine. In the cases of both these couples -- wherein each partner was adopting the other's child -- the children had been conceived by artificial insemination. Court-appointed guardians and Cook County Department of Supportive Services social workers reported that the children were thriving and "highly recommended" granting the co-adoptions as being in the best interests of the children.

But that didn't satisfy Judge Susan McDunn, who was returned to the bench by voters in November despite the Chicago Bar Association's negative recommendation and the Chicago Council of Lawyers' assessment that she was "not qualified." She tried to stall one of the cases until she had heard the other, even though there was no relation between the two. In the second case, she sent confidential information about the family to the notoriously anti-gay Washington, DC-based Family Research Council (FRC), a religious right political advocacy group. She named the FRC a party to both cases on the grounds that all sides should be considered.

Her supervisor, Presiding County Division Judge Francis Barth, reassigned her to traffic court in September 1998, reproached her for bias, removed her from the cases and granted the adoptions in December 1998 and February 1999. Barth wrote in February that McDunn had "lost sight of her role as the judge of an individual case" and that, "I find that Judge McDunn has demonstrated a deep aversion to this sort of adoption proceeding. That deep aversion manifests itself in her manner of conducting this type of litigation [in] that it warps her ability to be fair to the parties before her." Yet McDunn refused to relinquish the cases and issued orders of her own in February and March which she declared voided both the adoptions and Barth's action in removing her from the cases; these actions were the ones appealed to the higher court, which set them aside.

On behalf of himself and his Appellate Court colleagues Justice Calvin Campbell and Justice Patrick Quinn, Justice Morton Zwick read aloud that, "We are taking this uncommon and extraordinary action to ameliorate an inexcusable injustice," one he said "discredited not only the judiciary, but the citizens of Illinois." He declared that McDunn had exhibited a "predetermined bias against lesbians," a violation of the state's judicial code of ethics. McDunn's improper actions included the unnecessary delays in granting the adoptions, "insensitive and wrongful interrogation of the parent's sexual history" at a needless full hearing, voiding Barth's orders, disclosing confidential information to the FRC, and naming the FRC a "secondary guardian" to the children. Zwick said the panel was "astonished" by McDunn's bringing the FRC into the case, which he said had "no logical or relevant relationship to the case." "No judge has the right or authority to place themselves above the interests of the parties," he read.

Zwick concluded, "If the adoptive parents are in this courtroom, you have my apologies as a judge. If that seems woefully inadequate, I have no other solace for the trouble you have had."