Cheryl Starks
Chair |
Hon. Cheryl A. Starks was elected to the Circuit Court of Cook County in 1996. From 1999 until her retirement in November 2010, Judge Starks was assigned to the Cook County Law Division. Her typical cases were, complex and multi-million dollar negligence lawsuits, medical and professional negligence and environmental class action jury trials. She has successfully settled many cases involving medical and professional malpractice claims, construction cases, insurance disputes, and contracts. She was also selected to serve on a special committee to study the Law Division’ Black Line.
From 1996 until 1999, Judge Starks presided over abuse and neglect cases in Juvenile Court. Her prior legal experience includes Supervising Assistant Corporation Council for the Torts Division of the City of Chicago, Senior Trial Attorney for the Chicago Board of Education, and Office Administrator and Administrative Hearing Officer for the Illinois Department of Public Aid. She was also a public school teacher.
Judge Starks has served several times as a faculty member for the Illinois Judicial Education committee. She has been a guest speaker and panelist for numerous bar groups, Moot Court judge, nonprofit organizations, schools, and churches. She has also served several times as Chicago Public Schools, principal for a day. She served as a mentoring judge for new judges and was appointed as a judicial member on the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board.
Her current and former affiliations are; ADR Systems of America LLC, the Illinois Judicial Council, Illinois Judges Association, National Council for Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the Chicago Bar Association, Cook County Bar Association, Women Bar Association, Black Women Lawyers Association, and National Bar Association. Community organization includes Grateful House, Matthew House, The Lighthouse Church, and John Marshall High School Alumni Associations.
|
Leonard Cavise
Commissioner |
Commissioner Leonard L. Cavise has been a Professor of Law at DePaul University
College of Law for 28 years. He is a specialist in Evidence, Criminal Law, Criminal
Procedure, Trial Advocacy, and Comparative Law. He is the Founding Director of the
DePaul Center for Public Interest Law and the DePaul Chiapas Human Rights
Practicum. He also specializes in the training of lawyers from other countries in
American criminal law and procedure. He is often called upon to offer media
commentary on significant criminal law issues nationwide. His primary practice
experience is as a criminal defense lawyer, including homicide and death penalty
cases.
|
Hipolito (Paul) Roldan
Commissioner |
As Chief Executive Officer of Hispanic Housing Development Corporation, Mr. Roldan has developed over 3,200 affordable apartments and townhomes in 36 various developments for families and elderly residents of several Hispanic communities in Chicago. In addition, he has initiated the development of over 8,200 square feet of retail and office space in five Chicago-based developments. He has also directed the formation of a property management arm, which currently manages over 4,200 residential units in various communities through out Chicago and Illinois. Mr. Roldan also established, and now directs Tropic Construction Corp., a residential and commercial builder. Previous to his experience with Hispanic Housing, Mr. Roldan also developed low income housing in Brooklyn, New York.
In 1988, Mr. Roldan was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work in Community Development. He committed $100,000 of his fellowship award for the establishment of the Teresa and Hipolito Roldan Community Development Scholarship Fund in order to attract Latinos into the community development field. He was awarded a Bronze Star with "V" Device for combat duty in Vietnam, and holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Studies from St. Francis College, and a Master's degree in Urban Studies from Long Island University in New York.
Mr. Roldan also serves on various boards and committees including the Chicago board of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Mayor Daley's Green Ribbon Committee for Climate Change, Latino Policy Forum, MB Financial, N.A., Housing Partnership Network, and The Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. He was an "Inner-City Advisor" and former National Trustee of the Urban Land Institute, and is a board member of the Boston-based The Community Builders, an Illinois Director of Seguros Multiples - a Puerto Rico-based insurance cooperative, and serves as a member of Bank of America's Community Advisory Council.
Mr. Roldan was a participant in President Clinton's Economic Conferences held in Little Rock in 1992, and Columbus, Ohio in 1995. In 2006, Mr. Roldan co-authored Casa y Comunidad, a Latino Home and Neighborhood Design book. |
Neil Toppel
Commissioner |
Neil Toppel graduated with Distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996 with a Bachelor of Art's degree in Behavior Science & Law. He received the UW Political Science Department's Davis Award for best student performance in the field of constitutional law and judicial process.
Immediately following his graduation from University of Wisconsin, Mr. Toppel attended Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he received Cali Awards for excellence in the fields of Criminal Procedure-Adjudicative Process (Fall 1997) and Forensic Science (Fall 1998). While at Kent, he studied civil rights litigation under renowned Section 1983 scholar Sheldon Nahmod. Mr. Toppel received his Law Degree with Honors from Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1999.
Before joining the Cook County Public Defender's Office in March 2000, Mr. Toppel worked as an attorney handling first amendment, police brutality, gender and race discrimination litigation. Mr. Toppel left the Felony Trial Division of the Cook County Public Defender after spending more than 4 and a half years with the Office of the Public Defender. During his tenure with the Public Defender, Mr. Toppel handled hundreds of misdemeanor and felony cases, and presented lectures on Illinois Criminal Procedure to Illinois attorneys. In the Fall of 2004, Mr. Toppel and Richard Dvorak, his friend and colleague from the Cook County Public Defender's Office, formed the partnership of Dvorak & Toppel.
Mr. Toppel is a member of the Illinois Bar, the general and trial bars for the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, the Bar of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, as well as a member of the Bar of the United States District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin.
In September of 2010, Mr. Toppel was also selected to serve as a Criminal Justice Act Panel Attorney for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois where he was appointed by the courts to represent federally charged criminal defendants. |
Rob Warden
Commissioner |
An award-winning legal affairs journalist, is the co-founder and Executive Director
of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. His
investigations into wrongful convictions in Illinois capital cases in the 1980's set a
movement in motion that culminated in the abolition of the state's death penalty on
March 9, 2011. (See Eric Zorn, "toast, of sorts, to the warriors," Chicago Tribune,
March 10, 2011.) Mr. Warden is the author or co-author of hundreds of articles and
and seven books, including four focusing on wrongful convictions - Gone in the Night
(Delacorte, 1993), A promise of Justice (Hyperion, 1998) The Dead Alive
(Northwestern University Press, 2005) and True Stories of False Confessions
(Northwestern University Press, 2009).
He currently is working on a book on the execution of likely innocent persons to be published by Northwestern University Press. Mr. Warden has won more than fifty journalism awards, including the Medill School of Journalism's John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, two American Civil Liberties Union James McGuire Awards, five Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Norval Morris Award from the Illinois Academy of Criminology. In 2003, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Hame. |
Craig Futterman
Alternate Commissioner |
|
Doris Green
Alternate Commissioner |
Reverend Doris J. Green, B.A., CADC, CCHP has worked with the incarcerated population for over 29 years. In her current position, Director of Correctional Health & Community Affairs at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago she develops and implements innovative strategies to assist highly impacted communities respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She is the founder of Men & Women in Prison Ministries/Universal House of Refuge Center. She has been selected as a speaker at numerous conferences throughout the country, most recently the National Commission on Correctional Health Care Conference, October 2010. In 2004 Reverend Green was appointed to the Cook County Bureau of Health Services, Institutional Review Board as the Prisoner Representative. In 2006, she successfully launched the Faith Responds to AIDS (FRA) committee a broad interfaith coalition of Chicago land leaders', organizations and faith communities in a committed and effective response to stop HIV/AIDS. On August 18, 2007 while in Benin, West Africa Rev. Green was appointed Ambassador for World Peace by the Universal Peace Foundation and the Interreligious & International Federation for World Peace. In 2010 appointed Commissioner for the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission. In 2011 she was selected Advisory Board Member for NAACP Health Department in Washington D.C. |
Marcie Thorp
Alternate Commissioner |
Marcie Thorp is Of Counsel with the law firm of SmithAmundsen LLC and specializes in civil defense matters at the trial and appellate levels. She is a former Assistant States Attorney with the Cook County States Attorney's Office. Ms. Thorp earned her Bachelor of Science degree in finance from the University of Illinois and her Juris Doctorate degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law. In addition to her legal career, Ms. Thorp is an adjunct professor with Chicago-Kent College of Law teaching courses in trial advocacy. |