The newly elected clerk of the Cook dinner County court docket system was sworn in Monday, vowing to reform a division suffering from scandal beneath her two predecessors.
After being sworn in on the Daley Heart, Mariana Spyropoulos mentioned she would work to make court docket information extra accessible to litigants and the general public alike — fulfilling a promise she made throughout her marketing campaign to unseat present court docket clerk Iris Martinez.
“The clerk’s workplace is the entrance door to our judicial system,” Spyropoulos mentioned. “I pledge to maintain this door open for everybody, not simply those that know tips on how to navigate the system.”
The clerk’s workplace employs greater than 1,000 individuals, manages billions of pages of court docket information and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in fines, charges and bond funds. Whereas it’s important to the nation’s largest county court docket system, the clerk’s workplace often attracts consideration just for its blunders or outright corruption.
Spyropoulos simply defeated Martinez final spring within the Democratic major, then received the overall election in November. Martinez pulled off an upset win Within the open race to exchange Dorothy Brown, a longtime author. Like Spyropoulos, Martinez is dedicated to transparency and technological development.
Brown left workplace after an almost two-decade tenure marred by investigations that centered on allegations of promoting jobs to marketing campaign donors, an actual property deal involving her husband, and a mortgage to a goat-farming firm by one in every of her deputies. Brown was by no means indicted, however a number of senior representatives have been, and he or she selected to not search a fifth time period.
Martinez oversaw the launch of an improved on-line information system and spruced up dingy places of work that have been full of paper recordsdata. But it surely has additionally been criticized for operational failures, together with… – Error in recording felonies within the accused’s information Who’ve accomplished pretrial diversion and bond refund applications.
Martinez, the primary Latina to function clerk, was typically at odds with occasion leaders who ultimately backed Spiropoulos, a former commissioner on the D.C. Water Reclamation District board.
Spyropoulos spoke Monday about restoring belief within the workplace by eradicating politics from day-to-day operations, and pledged to not settle for marketing campaign donations from her workers.
“I will ask you one factor [employees]She mentioned. “I’ll ask them to current the viewers with their greatest work.”
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