Each day of the 2017 trial brought troubling news about defense attorney Bernard Shelton Jr.’s health.
Before jury selection began, Shelton told Cook County Circuit Judge Ursula Walowski he was getting over a bad case of food poisoning and was not in any shape to strongly defend his client, who was accused of abusing his then-girlfriend. But the judge noted that the case was already four years old and told Shelton, “Sometimes, you know, we do have to sacrifice.”
The next day, Walowski paused the trial because Shelton had been hospitalized. Shelton returned to court the third day but said he was suffering facial swelling — a seeming result of the food poisoning — and going forward would rob his client of his constitutional right to a fair trial.
Walowski told Shelton she understood he was “not 100 percent” but she thought he was doing capable work, and the trial would continue. After a jury convicted the defendant, Solomon Muhammad-Ali, Walowski denied Shelton’s motion for a new trial, which argued the proceedings hadn’t been fair because of Shelton’s illness.
Walowski told him, “I found that you did a fine job representing your client.”
In 2021, the Illinois Appellate Court pointedly disagreed.
“The court abused its discretion by failing to consider the relevant factors in ruling on Mr. Muhammad-Ali’s motion for a continuance and instead determining, contrary to what Mr. Shelton repeatedly stated, that Mr. Shelton was ‘fine.’ Mr. Shelton was forced to proceed to trial while ill and with little time to prepare,” Appellate Court Judge Mary L. Mikva wrote in her ruling reversing the conviction.
The defendant later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, and Walowski sentenced him to time served. Shelton died of an unrelated ailment in 2020, but his wife, Alisia Shelton, remembered her late husband suffering through the trial.
“He was pretty grumpy, as one would be, having to be out in the world with your face swollen up,” she said.
That unusual case is part of a trend over Walowski’s most recent six-year term, her first full term in the criminal division. The court overturned her judgments, rulings or sentences at least 25 times. That’s substantially more than any of the other five criminal court judges asking voters to return them to the bench in November, though other judges have fared worse in the past.
Injustice Watch found Walowski’s appellate rulings while researching the 61 judges running for retention this fall. Several other judges up for retention suffered numerous or noteworthy reversals. At least one had a case reversed and sent back to a different judge, which the appellate court does only rarely.
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But the rulings in Walowski’s cases stood out for their number and occasionally for the pointed disapproval of her actions. Although some reversals stemmed from technical errors or failures by defense attorneys, the court criticized Walowski’s work repeatedly. In one case, the appellate court accused her of a “complete failure” to follow rules designed to protect a defendant’s rights. In two more, the court said she was so wrong about the evidence that her decisions couldn’t stand.
The reversal in the case of the sick lawyer spotlighted a trait noted by Walowski’s critics and supporters alike: She rushes attorneys.
Assistant public defenders complained that Walowski sometimes hurries and mistreats them, which stokes hostility from some clients. Those attorneys said Walowski shares the blame for two defendants charged with attacking their assistant public defenders in her courtroom over the past two years.
Walowski disagreed with that claim. In an interview, she told Injustice Watch that she, too, was concerned about those attacks. She said she isn’t just aiming for speed in a famously sluggish system, but that efficiency is in the best interests of everyone involved — including defendants who are often stuck in jail pretrial.
“That is beneficial to the attorneys, the parties in the cases, as well as the public at large, to make sure that cases do move judiciously,” she said.
Her run of reversals stems in part from her working efficiently through lots of cases in criminal court, where appeals are frequent, she said. She declined to comment on specific cases — some of which remain open — in keeping with court rules. But she said, “I respect the appellate court’s decisions.”
“I do try to get things right as much as possible in each particular case, but sometimes things can be missed,” she said. “Mistakes can happen, but I strive to avoid them.”
Opinions vary among attorneys who practice before Walowski, from those who described her as rude or hostile to others who said she’s practical and fair. Veteran defense attorney Steven Greenberg — who said he lost a case against her when she was a prosecutor and has practiced in her courtroom — said she’s been humane to his clients.
“I think she tries to do the right thing. I think she recognizes that the people in front of her are human beings, and that sometimes people make mistakes,” he said.
With nearly two decades on the bench, Walowski is more experienced than most judges seeking to keep their jobs this election season. Born in Poland, she came to Chicago when she was 8. She spent 14 years as a Cook County assistant state’s attorney before winning election in 2008.
She sustained few reversals before her most recent term, but the courts do not publish data on how frequently the appellate court reverses decisions in divisions where Walowski previously served.
This term, the court said Walowski plainly misjudged the evidence when she denied Norman McIntosh a certificate of innocence in a murder case. McIntosh, who spent 14 years in prison for a 2001 shooting on Chicago’s South Side, was exonerated in 2016 after all the witnesses who identified him recanted.
Like many exonerated people, McIntosh told Injustice Watch he wanted the certificate because it comes with money and the expungement of court records. These days, prosecutors under Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke almost always object to the certificates. But her predecessor, Kim Foxx, rarely did, and she didn’t try to block McIntosh’s certificate. Judges nearly always grant unopposed petitions.
Walowski didn’t. She cited inconsistencies in the witness recantations, questioned their credibility and said McIntosh’s case for a certificate was “unpersuasive.”
That was clearly wrong, appellate judges wrote in 2021 as they told Walowski to give McIntosh the certificate.
“The evidence of McIntosh’s innocence was so one-sided that the ‘opposite conclusion is apparent,’” the three-judge panel wrote.
McIntosh also questioned Walowski’s fairness.
“She definitely should not be a judge because she still has a prosecutorial manner,” he said. “You can’t be a judge if you ain’t gonna be impartial, and she’s definitely not that.”
In another case, a reversal gave way to violence in Walowski’s courtroom.
Murder defendant Wynton Stewart in 2019 rejected the help of an assistant public defender, disastrously represented himself and was convicted. In 2023, the appellate court granted him a new trial, criticizing Walowski for failing to explain the constitutional right to an attorney or the potential consequences of acting as his own lawyer and calling her work “a complete failure” to follow court rules. Stewart was later convicted again.
At a 2025 postconviction hearing, this time with an assistant public defender by his side, Stewart complained about his lawyer and argued with Walowski, frequently interrupting, a court transcript shows. Walowski also chastised the assistant public defender for taking too long to get a transcript he needed for a court filing. The hearing ended when Stewart abruptly struck his attorney in the face, causing him to crash to the floor, according to body camera footage and court records. Stewart is charged with aggravated battery.
That was one of two similar incidents in Walowski’s courtroom over the course of seven months.
At a chaotic hearing in March to determine whether he was fit to stand trial for murder, defendant Raylon East refused to stay seated, argued with Walowski, and interrupted repeatedly to say his assistant public defender was not actually his lawyer, according to a transcript. He was by turns belligerent and unresponsive to Walowski’s questions before he once again told the assistant public defender, “You are not on the case” and attacked her and a sheriff’s deputy, according to body camera video and court records. On the way out of the courtroom, he spat at Walowski, she said from the bench. He is charged with aggravated battery.
Attacks on lawyers happen occasionally at the busy criminal courthouse, though there’s no publicly available data indicating how often they happen before each judge.
An attorney for Stewart declined to comment on whether Walowski’s courtroom conduct might have played any role in his outburst. Injustice Watch could not reach East’s attorney for comment.
Assistant Public Defender Julie Koehler, chief of the homicide task force and supervisor of both attorneys attacked in front of the judge, told Injustice Watch she felt Walowski stands out for criticizing and hurrying assistant public defenders in a way that stokes the anger of their clients. Koehler blamed Walowski for failing to de-escalate tensions, and noted she didn’t cut the hearings short as East and Stewart grew increasingly upset.
“When she’s in the courtroom, she needs to be more aware of the effect her words are having on the clients. Especially when she’s sitting on a pedestal, and we’re standing or sitting right next to the client, they have nowhere to go with this anger except at their public defender,” Koehler said.
Walowski said she didn’t think the court record fully supported Koehler’s claims but that “security for everyone in the courtroom is of utmost importance.” She said she’d never had that kind of violence in her courtroom before 2025.
“I have been successful in de-escalating situations so they never get to the point that these particular incidents have gotten to,” she said.
Voters can find detailed information on all 60 Cook County Circuit Court judges and one Illinois Appellate Court judge running for retention this year — including information about their careers on the bench, professional backgrounds and any controversies — in our judicial election guide.
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