This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

                        It’s impossible to faithfully reconstruct what happened during Hernandez’s eviction court proceedings, because there was no court reporter present to make     transcripts. This is the norm in Cook County. The absence of systematic record keeping for eviction trials means that both plaintiffs and defendants lose     any meaningful opportunity to appeal judges’ decisions. If judges behave inappropriately or misinterpret the law, there’s no way to hold them accountable.     Meanwhile, the lack of systematic record keeping about even the most basic things, such as the number and types of eviction cases filed every year and     their outcomes, makes it difficult for legal observers and the press to get an accurate, big-picture sense of what’s happening.


                    Here’s what little we do know: the Lawyers’ Committee published the    most recent comprehensive report on eviction courts     in Cook County in 2003. Based on observations of nearly 800 eviction cases, researchers found that the average eviction trial took just one minute and 44     seconds.



                        Eviction courts once had court reporters, just as every criminal courtroom does today. But they were taken away by order of Cook County chief judge Timothy Evans in     2003 for lack of state funding.



                    “Evictions are not a symptom of poverty—evictions are actually a cause,” says attorney Lawrence Wood, director of the housing practice group at the    Legal Assistance Foundation. The foundation provides pro bono eviction-court representation to tenants who live     in public housing or have a Section 8 rental-assistance voucher. “[Evictions are] especially devastating in the subsidized housing context because the     person doesn’t just lose the unit—they’re going to lose the subsidy.”



                        After overruling King’s lawyer’s objection, Moltz also openly states that he enforces agreements such as the one between King and the property manager even     when he knows an unrepresented tenant didn’t understand the terms: “[I]n virtually 90 percent of the cases where there’s an agreement, one side is     generally an attorney and one side is pro se [i.e., self-represented], and it’s very often that somebody doesn’t understand it, but we generally enforce them.”