Where do you go when everyone in the case — plus some of their families — somehow works in the Cook County criminal justice system?
Skokie.
That’s where Judge Raymond L. Jagielski on Wednesday sent a case from a June 3, 2010, fight at the Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California between a Cook County prosecutor and the public defender now charged with aggravated battery and resisting arrest.
Authorities said Henry Hams fought with Michael McCormick outside a snack shop on the courthouse’s main floor. When two sheriff’s deputies tried to pull Hams off McCormick, Hams continued choking him with one hand and attempted to resist the deputy’s efforts with his other hand, police said.
Hams’ case already was moved from 26th and California to suburban Bridgeview because McCormick and a sheriff’s deputy who’s a complaining witness in the case work in the Criminal Courts building.
Then his attorney argued Wednesday that McCormick had prosecuted cases in Bridgeview before the assigned judge, John J. Hynes, on four occasions. And the sheriff’s deputy’s wife also is a prosecutor in the Bridgeview courthouse, defense attorney Dan Radakovich said.
Jagielski denied those requests, in part because the state attorney general’s office is prosecuting the case. But then he decided to move the case to the county courthouse in north suburban Skokie to, as he said, eliminate further distraction and get the case rolling more than a year after the scuffle happened. Hams, of Chicago, returns to court there on July 27.
McCormick, who lives in Orland Park, also is suing Hams in Cook County, alleging he suffered severe and permanent injuries in the fight.
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