Court Opinion

ID: 9860248
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 23:15:57.39731+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:19:38.390999
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE HARRISON, dissenting: I agree that litigants must strictly adhere to the time limits we have established in Rule 303 (134 Ill. 2d R. 303) for filing notices of appeal. I agree that litigants may not use a petition under section 2 — 1401 of the Code of Civil Procedure (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1991, ch. 110, par. 2 — 1401) as a vehicle for extending those time limits. I even agree that the failure to comply with Rule 303’s time limits cannot be excused on the grounds that counsel relied on erroneous advice from the trial judge. What I cannot agree with is the majority’s view that these principles compel dismissal of Frank Mitchell’s appeal. The flaw in the majority’s position is that it is premised on the belief that the circuit court’s order became a final and appealable judgment as of March 1, 1991. This is not so. As the majority itself recognizes, a judge’s decision in a case must be expressed publicly, in words, and at the situs of the proceedings before it will be considered a rendition of a judgment. An order is deemed to have become public at the situs of the proceedings when it is filed with the clerk of the court. (Granite City Lodge No. 272, Loyal Order of the Moose v. City of Granite City (1990), 141 Ill. 2d 122, 123.) In the case before us, a copy of the court’s judgment was ultimately produced which bore a clerk’s file stamp dated March 1, 1991. The record further shows that the clerk’s docket sheet contained an entry, also dated March 1, which stated, "ORDER ON REVIEW SIGNED BY JUDGE MYERSCOUGH.” The problem is that Judge Myerscough’s order had not, in fact, been placed in the court’s file on March 1. Indeed, it was still not in the file nearly two months later, when Mitchell’s attorney came to check on April 25, nor could it be located by the clerk’s staff among the unfiled papers in the clerk’s office. Somewhere between the file stamp and the file cabinet it had simply vanished. Where the signed order went we may never know. Amicus curiae the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association points out that the Sangamon County clerk’s office was beset by paperwork problems at the time this dispute arose. Lost or misplaced records were evidently commonplace. On at least one occasion, stacks of court documents were left to blow out open office windows. Some ended up on the courthouse lawn, some in a fountain pool, and some no one knows where. The order in question here may not have met so extreme a fate. Even so, the fact remains that from the time the order was first signed on February 27, until sometime after April 25, it was not part of the court file. Although a copy of the order did turn up on the 25th, there is no evidence that this particular copy had ever passed through the clerk’s hands. It bore no file stamp and was located by the court reporter among her personal notes, not in any official court records. Because the order was not actually placed in the file and could not even be located in the clerk’s office, it was not available for inspection by the parties, their attorneys or anyone else. Under these circumstances, the order was in no sense public. Lacking public expression, it could not operate as a final and appeal-able judgment. To hold otherwise, as the majority does here, is tantamount to finding that a party’s legitimate right to appeal can be defeated through the ineptitude of some unknown deputy clerk. Such a result is wholly inconsistent with the orderly system of review we have striven to create through our rules of court. The majority suggests that the problems here could have been avoided if only Mitchell’s counsel had monitored the case more closely. Blaming counsel was an expedient the court employed in Granite City Lodge No. 272, Loyal Order of the Moose v. City of Granite City (1990), 141 Ill. 2d 122, but it will not work under the facts of this case. In Granite City the order had at least been filed by the clerk and could have been checked by counsel anytime. Not even that was possible here. As I have just discussed, the order did not reach the court file before April 25. While counsel may have been able to ferret out the order earlier had he initiated his search sooner, that was not his responsibility. An attorney’s obligation to monitor the progress of a case does not include the duty to insure that the court file is compiled properly in the first instance. By statute, that is the responsibility of the circuit clerk (see generally Ill. Rev. Stat. 1991, ch. 25, par. 13), who is expressly required to "enter of record all judgments and orders of their respective courts, as soon after the rendition or making thereof as practicable” (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1991, ch. 25, par. 14) on penalty of criminal punishment (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1991, ch. 25, par. 15). I note, moreover, that while some 31/2 months passed between the last hearing on the merits of the case, which was January 10, and counsel’s personal investigation at the courthouse on April 25, there is nothing in the record which suggests that he should have been on notice that the trial court might issue its ruling sooner. Experienced litigators may hope that justice will be swift, but they know it often is not. Given the demands of the adversarial process and the burdens on our trial courts, delays have become a common, if lamentable, feature of contemporary litigation. The circuit court of Sangamon County has not escaped this trend. During 1991, 78% of the cases on the' county’s miscellaneous remedy docket, as this one was, were pending more than 12 months. (Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts, 1991 Annual Report to the Supreme Court of Illinois 104.) By contrast, only l1 h months had passed here between the time this case was first filed and the time counsel decided to check the file on April 25. That a ruling on the merits had been made within this brief period is a testament to Judge Myerscough’s efficiency, but it is scarcely something which counsel could be expected to have anticipated. As soon as Mitchell’s counsel discovered something was amiss, both he and Judge Myerscough acted with the utmost diligence in attempting to remedy the situation. After giving all parties an opportunity to be heard, Judge Myerscough had the signed order properly filed on April 29. It was then and only then that the order constituted a final and appealable judgment so as to trigger the time limit specified by Rule 303(a) (134 Ill. 2d R. 303(a)). Because Mitchell’s attorney filed the requisite notice of appeal less than 30 days later, the appeal was timely and was therefore properly considered on the merits by the appellate court. Accordingly, I dissent.