Ray Klingbiel - The 1969 Scandal

The 1969 Scandal

In 1969, Sherman Skolnick, head of the Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts, examined the stockholder records of the Civic Center Bank & Trust Company (CCB) and discovered that both Klingbiel and Chief Justice Solfisburg owned stock in the CCB. This made him suspicious since in People v. Isaacs, the Supreme Court had upheld a dismissal of charges against Theodore J. Isaacs, the general counsel of the CCB and the records showed that the two justices acquired the stock shortly before their decision in Isaacs. Klingbiel's CCB stock was worth approximately $2500. Skolnick contacted several members of the media, and the story was broken in the Alton Evening-Telegraph before being picked up by all the major papers.

The Illinois House of Representatives unanimously voted to appoint a special committee to investigate the matter, but before it could act, the Supreme Court, acting on its "inherent powers" granted a motion filed by Skolnick to appoint a special commission to investigate. (Ironically, the regular commission that investigated judicial malfeasance was chaired by Klingbiel.) The commission was co-chaired by the president of the Chicago Bar Association and the president of the Illinois State Bar Association. They named John Paul Stevens, a private practitioner with a thriving antitrust practice, as their independent counsel, thus setting the stage for Stevens' meteoric rise to the Supreme Court of the United States.

During the course of the investigation, Klingbiel initially said that he had purchased the stock long after the decision in Isaacs, but when it was revealed that he had received the stock as a gift before the decision, he claimed that the stock was a campaign contribution, which did not seem plausible since it was received after the campaign was over and his campaign fund still had a lot of money in it. Stevens' investigation further revealed that Klingbiel was assigned the decision in Isaacs even though it wasn't his turn in the court's rotation, and he discovered evidence of Solfisburg suggesting that CCB officials "do something nice" for Klingbiel. When the commission reported back, it recommended that both Klingbiel and Solfisburg resign, which they grudgingly did a short time later.

Klingbiel remained bitter about the "political push" which took him from the bench and to the end refused to admit that he had done anything wrong.