Judge lifts courthouse ban over cellphone after threatening jail time — 'She was a bully'
Robert Almodovar was sitting in Judge Peggy Chiampas’ courtroom last October when he was approached by a sheriff’s deputy who asked him if he had a cell phone on him.
And so began a nine-month exile from the Leighton Criminal Courthouse where Almodovar was working as a law clerk after spending more than 20 years in prison for a double murder he did not commit.
While talking with the deputy, Almodovar said he believed he was allowed to have a phone in the building because he was there as a law clerk, but he offered to stow the phone in a locker downstairs.
Almodovar said he was about to do that when Chiampas began yelling at the deputy from the bench, “Bring him in, bring him in, bring him in.”
While the general public is banned from bringing a cell phone into the Leighton Criminal Courthouse by order of the chief judge, attorneys, police officers, members of the media, court employees and many others with business there are all allowed to keep their phones.
A list on the court’s website states “authorized employees of attorneys” are among them.
But Chiampas ordered Almodovar, “Let me have your phone, please,” according to a court transcript of the Oct. 4 hearing. “Sit down and don’t leave this courtroom. If you leave this courtroom, sir, I will hold you in direct criminal contempt of court.”
“I was sweating bullets, I was scared,” Almodovar recalled in an interview with the Sun-Times on Thursday. “I didn’t want to get locked up again.”
Before becoming a law clerk, Almodovar was sentenced to life in prison for his conviction in a double murder case and spent 23 years behind bars before his conviction was overturned. He was granted a certificate of innocence in 2018.
Almodovar said he waited four hours, terrified he would be placed in jail, before Chiampas addressed him again.
Deputy Tracy Nelson told the judge she became “concerned” because Almodovar said he was there to “observe” the public hearing but did not have a case on the court call.
The deputy said someone informed her that he had a phone but did not say she saw him use it, according to court records.
“Let me tell you what my options are,” Chiampas told Almodovar, saying she “could hold you in direct criminal contempt of court and sentence you to six months in the Cook County Department of Corrections for violating an order that is established in his building.”
Or, the judge offered, Almodovar could “voluntarily … open up your phone so that they could check to ensure no photos were taken … and nothing was spread on social media regarding anything in this building or in this courtroom.”
Almodovar, who said he had done none of those things but felt he had no option to deny the judge, allowed his phone to be searched. The deputy reported that she found “no pictures, no videos and no social media stories on his phone,” according to the transcript.
Still, Chiampas said she would ban him from the courthouse.
"If you come to this building again ... I, sir, will give you the max six months. Do you understand me?” The judge later clarified to another attorney that Almodovar was banned "unless he has a [criminal] case, is subpoenaed to appear or has prior approval of Court," according to the transcript.
The order was never made a part of any case file and Almodovar said he was denied a copy when a deputy returned his phone after its contents were copied.
On Thursday, Chiampas removed the ban after months of wrangling over a motion by Almodovar's attorney filed to overturn the judge’s “illegal” order.
“The order is vacated and the matter is dismissed off call,” Chiampas said sternly to his attorney, Steve Greenberg, without looking up from the bench. She offered no explanation.
“It was an abuse of power,” said civil rights attorney Jennifer Bonjean, who represented Almodovar in his wrongly conviction case and now employs him as a clerk. Being a judge “doesn’t mean you can make your own rules," she added.
Bonjean is suing Chiampas separately over alleged misconduct by the judge, police officers and prosecutors over a case of two men who were previously accused of killing an off-duty Chicago police officer.
Almodovar said he is considering filing a complaint with the state's judicial oversight agency. “I felt like she was a bully,” he said. “How can she do this?”
As a law clerk, Almodovar files documents with the court and acts as an assistant for Bonjean, he said. He also helps others who have been exonerated, like himself, to navigate the world after their release.
“How to get an ID, stuff like that,” he said. “When I first got out, it took me months.”
In June, Chief Judge Tim Evans referred a case involving another judge to the Judicial Inquiry Board who had ordered an attorney taken into custody after he argued with her during a hearing. The attorney, who works for a prominent downtown law firm, was handcuffed by a sheriff’s deputy and briefly detained.
A spokesman for Evans said the chief judge did not have time to respond to questions posed by the Sun-Times on Thursday but offered an interview next week.
The Leighton Criminal Courthouse is unique in its strict ban on electronic devices, which is not in effect at other county courthouses.
The court claims on its website that the ban is in place to prevent people from “misusing cell phones by photographing witnesses and jurors in courtrooms where criminal cases are heard.”
In recent years, the state Supreme Court has pushed for courts to allow people to keep their devices in court buildings.
A 2022 policy enacted by the high court acknowledged that such devices “have become essential in society and are invaluable personal and business tools,” and such bans “hinder equal access to justice and impose unfair burdens on individuals who already face tremendous barriers to accessing the courts.”
Cell phone use is common at the courthouse, with lawyers, cops and reporters regularly seen in courtrooms using phones to pass the time between hearings and to do work during court calls that can last hours.
Most judges at the Leighton courthouse allow reporters to use computers to take notes, but an increasing number of judges in the last year have told deputies in their courtrooms that reporters can no longer do so after a member of a television news station was seen taking a picture during a hearing.
But among reporters, there are concerns about judge’s using their ability to ban media from using electronics as a punishment for coverage they find unfavorable.
Judge Angela Petrone, for example, stopped allowing media from using electronic devices in her courtroom to take notes after she made statements criticizing the coverage of her decision in May to seal records in a high-profile case.