New judges head to Cook County’s pretrial division where detention and release decisions are made

Clockwise from top left: Shauna Bolicker, Deidre Dyer, Antara Rivera, and Caroline Glennon (ChicagoCAC, JudgeDeidreDyer.com, Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, carolineforjudge.com)

CHICAGO — Regular CWBChicago readers will soon see four new names mentioned frequently in our reports. That’s because half of the judges who currently handle pretrial hearings, known as “bond court” during the cash bail era, are rotating to new assignments. And four judges will be replacing them.

The pretrial roster includes eight judges who handle day-to-day hearings and Judge Mary Marubio, who has been the Pretrial Division’s acting presiding judge since January 2023.

Leaving pretrial will be judges Charles Beach, Barbara Dawkins, Maryam Ahmad, and Kelly McCarthy, according to Chief Judge Timothy Evans’ office.

Beach, who has been assigned to pretrial since 2019, will go to the Law Division, according to Evans’ office. Dawkins, Ahmad, and McCarthy rotated into the Pretrial Division in October 2021. According to Evans’ spokesperson, Dawkins is heading to the Criminal Division, while Ahmad and McCarthy are heading to the First Municipal Division.

The incoming pretrial judges, according to Evans’ office, are:

• Shauna Bolicker, an associate judge since 2014 currently assigned to the probate division. Before becoming a judge, Bolicker served more than 25 years in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, including five years as the top aide to former State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez. She also served as chief of the office’s sex crimes division for eight years.
• Deidre Dyer, appointed to an associate judgeship in March 2023, is moving from the First Municipal Traffic Division. According to her website, Dyer is a former Cook County prosecutor who served as a deputy supervisor overseeing financial crimes, fraud, and public corruption cases. She also worked in the Illinois Attorney General’s Office’s Special Prosecutions Bureau.
• Caroline Glennon, an associate judge assigned to the Traffic Division, was a Cook County assistant public defender from 1997 until being appointed to the bench in January. She handled homicide cases for nearly 20 years.
• Antara Rivera has been assigned to the Traffic Division since being appointed to an associate judgeship earlier this month. She most recently worked as an arbitrator for the state’s Workers’ Compensation Commission and previously served as the chief of general prosecutions at the state’s Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. Rivera also worked as a special victims unit prosecutor in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The other judges currently assigned to the Pretiral Division are Judge Susana Ortiz, who rotated into the assignment with Beach in 2019 and three judges who joined the division in late 2022: William Fahy, David Kelly, and Ankur Srivastava.

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Tim Hecke is CWBChicago's managing partner. He started his career at KMOX, the legendary news radio station in St. Louis. From there, he moved on to work at stations in Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York City. Tim went on to build syndicated radio news and content services that served every one of America's 100 largest radio markets. He became CWBChicago's managing partner in 2019. His email address is tim@cwbchicago.com