Stalled Justice: Lawsuit on boy’s 2011 death is long over, but Cook County still hasn’t tried his mom for murder

On a sweltering July evening 12 years ago, medics raced to a Midlothian apartment and found a bleeding and badly bruised toddler struggling to breathe.

The little boy was too far gone to save. Soon came questions of who was to blame. Two court cases were launched in separate courthouses — showing two very different versions of what justice looks like in Cook County.

In the delay-prone criminal courts, prosecutors alleged that the boy’s mother, Marles Blackman, beat him to death. The murder case has limped along, unresolved, for more than a decade. It’s on its second judge, fourth defense attorney and fifth prosecutor. Two years ago, Blackman was released on bail to wait for trial.

By then, the county’s civil courts had long finished with a lawsuit filed by the child’s estate and premised on the assumption that Blackman killed him. A jury agreed with the plaintiffs that a child welfare agency bore blame by ignoring signs of child abuse. It awarded tens of millions of dollars to be split among lawyers and the boy’s relatives.

The contrasting paths taken by each court have fueled a strange legal paradox. Payouts have already been made on a lawsuit that presumes Blackman fatally abused her child, while the county’s criminal courts haven’t yet gotten around to determining whether she killed him.

That irony isn’t lost on the case’s lead detective, Daniel Delaney, who has watched the case stall while rising up the ranks of Midlothian’s department to become its chief.

“We’re at 12 years, which I’ve never seen a case take 12 years,” Delaney said with a sigh. “I have no idea why it’s taken so long.”

The Blackman murder case is an extreme example of a problem the Tribune exposed in the April series “Stalled Justice.”

In that investigation, the Tribune documented how Cook County’s criminal courts are taking longer than ever to conclude murder cases — and longer than any other major urban court system in America that could be studied. Reporters chronicled myriad reasons for chronic delays and showed how criminal judges get leeway to let cases linger from court leaders who have long ignored recommendations for fixes.

The Blackman murder case fits the profile of the kind of cases that linger in Cook County: It’s had a revolving cast of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, in a system that allows pretrial issues to fester on dockets for months or years, with little sense of urgency.

What’s unusual about the Blackman murder case is that it has a civil cousin of sorts: filed in the same county court system that involves the same death and questions of accountability.

Though the legal questions are different in the civil and criminal cases, a comparison of both shows how the civil case — with tens of millions of dollars at stake — proceeded far more swiftly, with the court imposing frequent deadlines on attorneys as they argued vigorously over complicated legal issues.

The lawsuit wasn’t a model of judicial efficiency — it took three times as long as national standards suggest. But it was fast compared with the criminal case, which so far has lasted twice as long as the civil one.

The office of Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans declined to answer questions about the delays, noting it is a pending case. County prosecutors and Blackman’s latest attorney also did not respond to questions on the case’s delays.

The Tribune also asked Evans’ office why the civil court managed deadlines more aggressively than the criminal court. It did not respond.

The lawyer who pushed the lawsuit, Jay Paul Deratany, said he assumed the criminal case had been wrapped up years ago. When told otherwise, he didn’t hide his surprise.

“Wow,” he said, pausing a few seconds before adding: “Wow.”

A toddler’s death

Both cases stem from what government and court records describe as Lavandis Hudson’s difficult birth, short life and tragic death.

Lavandis’ mother, Marles Blackman, conceived him during a brief relationship. The pregnancy came after years of drug addiction and what an assessment by the Department of Children and Family Services called “extremely violent criminal behavior” that included roughly 30 altercations with family, lovers and acquaintances. Her five older children had either grown up or were being raised by others.

She later told child welfare workers that, while carrying Lavandis, she smoked crack cocaine. Two days later — barely into her third trimester — her water broke. He was born in a hospital elevator on Jan. 5, 2009.

Lavandis struggled for his first breath, weighing barely 3 pounds, his blood coursing with traces of cocaine. Surgeons had to insert hollow tubes on each side of his head to drain fluid from a brain bleed. He became a ward of the state, his case overseen by a contracted social service agency.

In two months, after Lavandis recovered enough to live outside of a hospital, child welfare workers placed him with a foster mother in Hinsdale while allowing his biological mother back into his life by attending doctors’ visits and spending some time alone with him.

By October 2010, after Blackman had given birth to another child, child welfare workers recommended that Lavandis should live with Blackman, her new baby and her new boyfriend in their Midlothian apartment, with check-ins by the social service agency. A judge agreed.

Within months, court records show, signs of potential abuse emerged: trips to emergency rooms and doctors documenting bruising, scars and scabs on Lavandis. The mom told medical staff that the boy fell, or the younger sibling scratched him.

Lavandis’ father, Herbert Hudson, would later tell the Tribune he began reporting the injuries to a social worker around that time and sought custody — but to no avail.

Then came Lavandis’ final trip to the hospital, in July 2011. Marles Blackman told authorities she had left him alone in a bedroom when, minutes later, she heard a thump and found Lavandis lying on the floor, face up, with blood and other fluid coming out of his mouth, from what she believed was a seizure.

An ambulance drove the 2 ½-year-old to an emergency room. He was airlifted to another hospital and declared brain-dead the next day.

Blackman told authorities she hadn’t abused the child, and in his funeral program she wrote that he was “my light on my darkest days” and a “true Angel.”

But an autopsy soon revealed troubling injuries: head trauma, bite marks, signs of strangulation, and scars and bruises on his face and body. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide caused by multiple blunt-force injuries resulting from child abuse.

Police asked for a more detailed review by a prominent local expert on child abuse: Dr. Jill Glick, a pediatrician who runs the Child Advocacy and Protective Services team at University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital.

Glick concurred with the autopsy’s findings. She documented 22 categories of injuries — including ”abusive head trauma” that led to his death.

She wrote “there are numerous, too many to count, injuries that are not just suggestive but document ongoing battering to this child that involve all regions of the body.”

Dueling court cases

Marles Blackman wasn’t charged until February 2012 — seven months after the death, 3 ½ weeks after Glick’s report and the same week the Tribune chronicled how the state’s child welfare system had allowed the toddler to remain in her custody despite red flags suggesting abuse.

Five months after that, in July 2012, the toddler’s estate filed a lawsuit, saying he could have lived if the social service agency and medical providers had interceded to stop the abuse.

Two cases. Two far different legal worlds.

The lawsuit, led by the boy’s father, was filed in the court’s Law Division. It handles high-dollar lawsuits, typically in courtrooms perched high above the bustle of the Loop. To keep these civil cases on track, judges routinely fill out detailed orders that list tasks attorneys must complete and when they must be completed. The division even created a boilerplate form for judges to use.

The murder case landed in the south suburban Markham courthouse, a two-story gray building sandwiched between a strip mall and a water tower.

In the county’s criminal courts, it’s rare for felony judges to set due dates for tasks. And although a case management template is available, those orders are designed to be used just once, early in a case. Even then, the Tribune found, judges have rarely used them.

The cadence of each courthouse soon became clear in what each accomplished.

In the first three years of the civil case, lengthy motions were common. Lawyers argued complex legal theories, citing a bevy of past rulings. Some filings included exhibits that ballooned the total page count past 100. Circuit Judge Eileen Brewer once admonished a lawyer for filing a 20-page motion that she called “unnecessarily verbose.”

The criminal case file, by contrast, contains a few short, perfunctory motions from that period, and there’s little documentation on who was expected to do what, and when, to keep the case on track for trial.

The difference in the level of engagement is clear in transcripts from the hearings.

In the civil case, nine attorneys attended a May 2015 hearing, held in Brewer’s 22nd-floor courtroom in the Daley Center. The lawyers debated the fine points of who could legally be held liable for the toddler’s death, while the judge peppered them with questions and gave specific instructions to one attorney about a filing due in 45 days.

“So are you going to address my question about a voluntary assumed duty?” Brewer told the lawyer, referring to a legal concept debated that day. “That is really crucial. Do you understand?”

The action-packed hearing lasted half an hour.

Later that month, 25 miles away, the murder case was up before a felony judge in Markham. Two attorneys showed up — one each for the prosecution and for the defense. The hearing was over in about two minutes.

It was Blackman’s 36th court appearance since her arrest.

Among the causes for the delays, records show: The time it took prosecutors to gather and share potential evidence with the defense. The time spent waiting for the court’s psychological unit to confirm Blackman’s sanity. The time that passed while the judge got the unit to do a second evaluation, which confirmed what it found the first time. The time of waiting to see if the defense attorney would raise an issue with how police questioned his client years earlier. (He didn’t.)

The hearing in May 2015 touched on potential expert witnesses. Years earlier, an assistant public defender had begun reaching out to some before he retired. His replacement reported at the hearing that he was still firming up their testimony.

The attorney told the judge he needed another 30 days to file his formal discovery “answer” — typically a one-page filing listing potential defense witnesses.

That should have been done nearly two years earlier, if the case had followed court guidelines. But Circuit Judge Frank Zelezinski didn’t express any concerns over the case’s pace. Instead, he began looking ahead to the next status hearing.

“Work out a date with the (prosecutor) here,” he told the defense attorney.

With that, the hearing was over.

‘Fairly gradual pace’

Over the next three years, the criminal case was delayed while an investigation into Blackman’s background was completed.

Then because of another switch in public defenders, after the second one retired.

Then because of a switch in judges — again, due to a retirement.

The defense got more time to submit the answer to discovery — the one that, years earlier, was supposed to be filed within a month.

And time for a defense expert to prepare a study on the death.

Over that same three years, the civil case kept to a firm schedule, even as the case was passed to different judges after Brewer retired in 2016. In early 2017, the Law Division’s presiding judge set a trial date for March 2018, giving attorneys advance warning to finish up their work.

Civil lawyers flew across the country to depose possible witnesses in the lawsuit. Attorneys continued filing motions, with even beefier exhibits. One 13-page motion had so many attachments that it totaled 913 pages.

The civil attorneys kept a close eye on the criminal case too. That’s because, if the murder case wrapped up before the civil trial, Blackman could have been forced to testify.

But civil attorneys saw little movement in Markham.

“The most charitable way to characterize it,” civil attorney Andrew Ellbogen once reported in a Loop courtroom, was that the murder case was “moving at a fairly gradual pace.”

Those being sued over the child’s death wanted to stall the civil trial until the criminal one was done. But the civil judge wanted to push forward. During the civil trial, Blackman invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to say anything that could incriminate her in her pending murder case.

Court transcripts show that no attorney at the civil trial attempted to argue Blackman wasn’t guilty — not even the social service agency that monitored Blackman’s parenting.

“Now, look, the one and only person who injured or killed Lavandis was Marles Blackman. There’s no evidence to the contrary,” the agency’s attorney, Ian Sherman, told the jury. “It’s unfortunate. It’s tragic. That’s the fact.”

Sherman asked the jury not to put additional blame on his client, but the jury ordered the social service agency to pay $45 million.

The massive verdict was halved because of a side deal cut by both sides while the case was nearing its end. Even then, the amount set aside for the boy’s survivors, after settlements and attorney fees, totaled nearly $18 million.

The civil case wasn’t fast. It took nearly twice as long as recently enacted state standards and three times as long as recommended by the American Bar Association.

And, technically, the courts still haven’t closed the books on the lawsuit.

That’s because millions from the lawsuit went to Lavandis’ estate, and Blackman is one of the heirs. The estate’s lawyer filed an action to disqualify her from getting her share of the civil payout — roughly $900,000. Even if she’s not convicted of murder, the probate court can keep the money from her if a judge finds that Blackman “intentionally and unjustifiably” caused the boy’s death.

Deratany said there’s “a snowball’s chance in hell” Blackman will collect any money, based on what happened in the Law Division case.

But, by law, the probate court can’t consider the question until the criminal case concludes — regardless of how long that takes.

Resolution in 2023?

County court guidelines call for murder cases to be wrapped up within two years. In Cook County, the Tribune found, the typical murder case is now taking nearly five years to resolve.

The Blackman criminal case has been pending 11 ½ years, with no trial date set.

Attorneys and the criminal court judge spoke of scheduling a trial back in fall 2018, but then Blackman replaced the public defender’s office with a private attorney.

In a statement to the Tribune about its 6 ½ years on the case, the public defender’s office said it was proud of its attorneys’ “hard work providing a robust defense” to get the “complex” case ready for trial in 2018: “Such cases require a thorough investigation in addition to engaging medical and other experts who must review volumes of evidence.”

With the new private attorney, Derrick Reese, talk of a trial date ceased.

Court records show Reese spent much of his first years on the case getting a judge to lower the amount of bail money that needed to be posted for Blackman to get out of jail before trial: first from $100,000 to $50,000, then to $20,000.

That last sum was posted by one of Blackman’s adult children, someone who had shared in the civil settlement as a sibling of the dead toddler. Under the terms of her release, Blackman was put on electronic monitoring at her aunt’s home in Markham.

A trial date receded further as COVID-19 derailed jury trials for a year, a new prosecutor took over the case and the judge was briefly sidelined when he faced a domestic battery charge, later dismissed.

Complicating things: The public defender’s office had found a pathologist who drew a different conclusion about how the boy died, stating the cause of death was “complications associated with premature birth” and his other health issues, “possibly aggravated by a reported fall.” Over the years, she had billed the county $30,000. But then, in late 2022, Reese told the judge that the pathologist had retired and wouldn’t testify.

The judge said Reese could hire a new expert at taxpayer expense, but only for $150 an hour, or half the rate the previous one charged. Reese repeatedly told the judge he couldn’t find one that cheap, transcripts show. No one expressed any urgency.

That changed after the Tribune requested transcripts from the case this summer and started asking attorneys and the chief judge’s office about delays in the case.

At an Aug. 10 hearing, the 117th since Blackman’s arrest, Circuit Judge Carl Boyd agreed to a request by Reese — first made eight months earlier — to allow $300 an hour for an expert. In agreeing to the fee, Boyd noted it was “an older case.”

“The court would like to emphasize the necessity of trying to expedite this case so that we can resolve it — hopefully in the year 2023,” Boyd told the attorneys.

Neither attorney spoke of the likelihood of that happening. The five-minute hearing ended with attorneys agreeing to update the judge Sept. 27, at hearing No. 118.

Chicago Tribune’s Megan Crepeau contributed.

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