Judge Cynthia Brim
Judge Cynthia Brim, center, on trial for assaulting a deputy, passes through the Daley Center lobby. (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune / February 3, 2013)

By Steve SchmadekeTribune reporter
2:07 p.m. CDT, May 9, 2014
The Illinois Courts Commission today ordered that a Cook County judge who was found not guilty by reason of insanity of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy be removed from the bench effective immediately.
Judge Cynthia Brim, who has been suspended from her duties since 2012 but still collecting her $182,000-a-year salary, had argued that she could control her bipolar disorder with medication.
It was the first time the court commission – comprised of five judges from outside Cook County as well as two citizens – had taken up the issue of whether a mentally ill judge who had been found legally insane at trial could continue to serve on the bench.
“Our main concern in determining the appropriate sanction is to protect the public by ensuring the integrity of the judicial system,” the commission wrote in its unanimous ruling today. “Our goal is to maintain public confidence in our court system and its judicial officers.”
“We are sympathetic to respondent’s mental health issues,” the ruling said. “Nonetheless, the judicial profession requires a high level of mental ability and proper mental function.”
Brim had testified before the panel for nearly two hours in March in a bid to save her job. She was found not guilty of misdemeanor battery by reason of insanity last year for shoving a sheriff's deputy outside the Daley Center during a manic episode in March 2012. A day earlier, while on the bench, she broke into an extended rant while presiding over a traffic court call at the Markham courthouse.

"I just broke like a pencil," testified Brim, who said she was feeling stressed that day because only one courtroom deputy was present for a busy call. "It was totally inappropriate for me to say what I did at that time -- or any other time."

Brim, who has been hospitalized at least nine times for mental illness since 1994, acknowledged she had once been carried out of a Bridgeview courtroom on a stretcher after going "catatonic" during her court call. Her physicians had repeatedly allowed her to discontinue taking mood-stabilizing drugs, she said, but she wasn't diagnosed with a bipolar type of schizoaffective disorder until 2009.

Still, she had once gone off medication on her own and in the two years before her 2012 breakdown had stopped taking medications or seeing a psychiatrist or therapist.

But her psychiatrist, Dr. Roueen Rafeyan, told the commission there was only at most a 10 percent chance that Brim would ever have another relapse. He said others in stressful, important fields can function with the illness. 
"There are heart surgeons who have the same diagnosis and operate on patients all day long," he said. 
Brim is the first Illinois circuit judge removed from the bench in a decade.
The commission removed two Cook County judges between 2001 and 2004. Francis X. Golniewicz III violated residency requirements and made other infractions. Oliver Spurlock committed sexual misconduct by touching and kissing four female prosecutors against their will as well as having sex with a court reporter in his chambers.

 
sschmadeke@tribune.com