When Ramon Ocasio decided to run for Cook County judge last year he figured he’d be a shoo-in if he could win over the local committeemen who put the Democratic Party label next to judges’ names on the ballot. And he didn’t see why he couldn’t: He was a lifelong resident of the Sixth Judicial Subcircuit, where he was running, and had 16 years of experience as a lawyer in the county’s criminal courts; he now supervises 17 other attorneys in the public defender’s office. The Chicago Bar Association, which rates candidates as either “qualified” or “not recommended,” had found him qualified, as had the Chicago Council of Lawyers. And he was Hispanic, which only 4 percent of county judges are, even though the county is 22 percent Hispanic.
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But the 11 committeemen settled instead on Gloria Chevere and Edward Lechowicz for the two vacancies in the northwest-side subcircuit, so it’s their names that will have the party’s imprimatur on the March 21 primary ballot. Chevere, a 53-year-old Hispanic attorney, has been practicing for 25 years, served in Harold Washington’s administration as deputy commissioner of the Department of Streets and Sanitation, and was once a CTA executive. Lechowicz, a 36-year-old attorney, has been practicing law for only nine years–but two of them were in the law firm of Ed Vrdolyak, a family friend. And he has a franchise last name–his father is Ted Lechowicz, a 30th Ward veteran who was a state senator and a Cook County commissioner. Ocasio thinks politics trumped merit. “I was even told by some committeemen that after reviewing my resume they could tell I was qualified,” he says.
Even as the city and its governing class grew more diverse in the 80s and 90s the judges remained blindingly white. By the early 90s only around 13 percent of judges were black, 2 percent Latino. Frustrated, an unlikely coalition of black and Latino Democrats and white Republicans from the suburbs–who rarely got on the bench either–pushed to open up the process so that more of their own could become judges. In 1991 a state bill created a third way of electing judges, setting aside 165 circuit judgeships to be elected by the voters in 15 newly created subcircuits in the county, many of which contained a majority of black, Latino, or Republican voters. The power to slate candidates in these races shifted to local committeemen in each subcircuit.
Ocasio refused to pack it in. On his own he managed to get the required 2,000 signatures, survive a series of ballot challenges from Lechowicz’s lawyers, and win the endorsement of the Tribune, the Cook County Democratic Women’s Organization, and 35th Ward alderman and committeeman Rey Colon, who says his precinct workers will be distributing Ocasio’s literature. He also won the endorsement of the IVI-IPO–the only Sixth Subcircuit candidate to do so.
