It was late afternoon when Frank Goff and Scotty Freeman cleared the courtroom and descended to the marble lobby of the old Cook County Criminal Courts building. As they passed through the line of guards and metal detectors and stepped out into the icy December blast, they witnessed yet another court phenomenon unique to our time: the arrival of the night shift.

Cook County runs the largest court system in the world^[1] and these days it's practically spilling into the streets. Over the past two decades the case load has doubled, and then doubled again. But it would be political suicide to tap the voters for enough cash to quadruple the court system, so the County Board solved the problem by telling the judges, clerks, and lawyers to pitch in and work a little harder.

In a desperate effort to ease the docket, presiding judge Thomas Fitzgerald set up the first judicial night shift in the history of Cook County.^[2] In October of 1989, five associate judges were yanked out of traffic court and sent to 26th &