Judge unloads on lawyers in murder retrial
Says she believes attorney hoped she would ‘ die of cancer’
Lawyers for Malvin Washington don’t want Cook County Judge Diane Gordon Cannon to preside over his retrial in a 2004murder case.
Three sets of attorneys have tried five times to have the case assigned to another judge during the five years since he won a new trial.
Friday, Cannon made it crystal clear she won’t let go of a case that’s been on her docket for nearly a decade— and that she’d prefer Washington’s latest batch of lawyers were off the case instead.
In a 15- minute monologue, Cannon scolded defense attorneys Jeffrey Urdangen and Alison Flaum from the bench for twice filing motions to have her booted. Worse still, the judge said, was her belief that Urdangen said he hoped the judge would “die of cancer” or retire before Washington’s trial.
“For lack of a more grownup word, it’s creepy,” Cannon said, as Washington stood, bemused, in a prison jumpsuit beside the lawyers.
“I’m not going to die before Mr. Washington’s case is over, to your chagrin. I’m not going to retire before Mr. Washington’s case is over.”
“It was alarming to hear the judge repeatedly attribute this false statement to me,” Urdangen said in a statement after the hearing. “To suggest I would utter such a thing to one of my students, or to anyone else or about any person, is disturbing in the extreme.”
Washington and his lawyers said nothing during the rambling lecture, which ended with Cannon urging the defendant to consult with his lawyers about whether he wanted them to remain on the case when he goes to trial in two weeks.
Cannon had repeatedly mentioned the fate of Anthony McKinney, who died while awaiting a retrial in a case handled by lawyers who, like Urdangen and Flaum, were from Northwestern University’s Bluhm Legal Clinic.
“He died, never seeing the light of day, because of a professor from Northwestern,” Cannon said, an apparent reference to former NU journalism professor David Protess. “I did nothing in that case. He self- destructed. I see self- destruction.”
After a break to talk to his lawyers, Washington said he would stick with his lawyers.
Friday’s hearing was only the latest twist in the more than a decade in whichWashington’s case has been in Cannon’s cavernous, fifth- floor courtroom. Washington is set to go to trial in June; it will be the third time he has been tried for the murder of Marquis Reed, a shooting Washington has maintained was an act of self- defense.