Attorney jailed for missing start of trial in DuPage County

When someone is taken into custody in a courtroom, it is usually a defendant, not their lawyer.

But Chicago attorney Cierra Norris, who has nearly 500,000 followers on TikTok, found herself posing for a different kind of camera Wednesday — capturing her booking photo at the DuPage County jail.

DuPage County Judge Margaret O’Connell found Norris in indirect criminal contempt of court, and ordered her to a five-day stay in jail for failing to show up for the start of a jury trial Tuesday.

The absence

Norris represents Romaine Turner, who is accused of shooting at a Lombard police officer who was chasing him.

Norris had asked in February for Turner’s trial to be rescheduled, in large part because she could not be in two places at once. She had a trial due to start Tuesday in Cook County, and because that day was the deadline on that client’s speedy-trial demand, his trial had to start and she was required to be there, Norris argued in a motion.

Turner was willing to postpone his trial, she wrote. Plus, she needed more time to examine some new evidence the prosecution had just turned over — a 911 call that was missing the last four years.

Judge Margaret O’Connell denied the request.

Come Tuesday morning, Norris was missing; she was ordered to show up in the afternoon, but did not. O’Connell denied a second motion to postpone. Prosecutors filed a contempt petition, charging that Norris “willfully and contemptuously interfered with the judicial process.”

Tuesday night, Norris posted a video on TikTok, titled “POV: Criminal defense attorneys after the continue for trial was denied. But we will be ready for trial tomorrow tho” where she shuffled paperwork while lipsyncing the song “First”: “I don’t like it when the math ain’t mathin’.”

She then failed to show up on time on Wednesday, according to court records, and prosecutors filed a second petition.

It’s the second time in a year Norris has been charged with contempt in DuPage court. In a July 2024 petition, prosecutors charged she intentionally did not attend a hearing on her motion to suppress evidence in a different case.

And because of all this? You guessed it: Turner’s trial has been postponed, to July.

Intoxicated driver’s ed?

Was it new driver nerves or the lingering effects of the previous night’s marijuana use?

That’s the question before the Illinois Supreme Court later this month, when it hears the case of a former Stevenson High School student found guilty of driving under the influence of drugs during driver’s ed class.

The student — we’re not naming him because he was 16 years old at the time — was arrested in May 2021, after Lincolnshire police determined he was still feeling the effects of smoking pot the night before when he maneuvered erratically during a practice drive.

The male teen was convicted after a trial in January 2023, and sentenced to 12 months court supervision and 100 hours community service.

At the heart of the case before the state supreme court is whether testimony from the student’s driver’s ed instructor — who chalked up the teen’s driving troubles to nerves, not drugs — provides reasonable doubt.

That instructor had some 30 years experience teaching driver’s ed at the time and allowed the student to drive for about 40 minutes that day, despite his difficulties, Christopher McCoy, of the state appellate defender’s office, wrote in a brief to the high court.

“With all of that experience, it is unreasonable to infer (the instructor) would allow a student to drive — especially while he and another student were passengers — if he suspected the student driver was under the influence of drugs or otherwise impaired,” McCoy added.

The judge who convicted the student rejected similar arguments at trial, noting that a school dean and resource officer who met with the student after the practice drive both believed he was under the influence, and the teen admitted to using marijuana the previous night.

“The question for me is whether or not the defendant was under the influence of cannabis to a degree which rendered him incapable of safely driving. I believe he was,” Lake County Judge Bolling W. Haxall III said in finding the teen guilty. “I believe (the instructor’s) testimony about (the) driving may also have been due somewhat to his inexperience, but was also due to the cannabis that the defendant had at some point prior to driving that vehicle.”

The supreme court is set to hear oral arguments in the case March 19.

Crime pays?

The federal government continues to spend more than it takes in, but at least its prosecutors are raking in the dough.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois — based in Chicago and covering the suburbs — collected more than $100 million in criminal, civil and asset forfeiture actions in the 2024 fiscal year, officials announced last week.

That includes about $23.9 million from criminal matters; $6.4 million in civil actions; and $70.4 million in asset forfeitures. The office also teamed up with prosecutors in districts across the country to collect another $62.2 million in joint cases, officials said.

Where does all that cash end up? Some goes directly to victims who suffered physical injury or financial loss as a result of criminal actions. The rest goes to the Department of Justice’s Crime Victims Fund, which distributes it to state and local law enforcement agencies and victim assistance programs, among others places.