A newly elected judge in Chicago has been temporarily reassigned and referred to the state Judicial Inquiry Board after nine months on the bench following allegations that she shared a racist text message depicting an ad for a toy ankle monitor that included an AI-generated image of a Black toddler.
Cook County Judge Caroline Glennon-Goodman was reassigned Jan. 10 following a meeting of the court’s executive committee, led by Chief Judge Timothy Evans.
While the controversy sparked immediate concerns about potential bias in Glennon-Goodman’s rulings and whether she harbored inherent prejudice against Black people, it remains unclear whether she is still presiding over cases.
The bigoted image, which came to light after someone reportedly leaked it last week, ignited outrage online, with the the ad parodying the popular child toy brand Little Tykes. The ad shows a cute Black child with a fresh haircut, while a cutaway image shows the boy’s leg fitted with “My First Ankle Monitor.”
The package design on the fake ad — the one allegedly shared by Glennon-Goodman — says “little tiks,” completing the knockoff of the well-known brand.
Glennon-Goodman reportedly intended to send the image to a close friend as a joke, but instead texted it by accident to another member of the judiciary with the same first name, according to Injustice Watch.
Before pressing send, the judge added her own context, saying, “My husband’s idea of Christmas humor,” according to Injustice Watch. It’s not clear whether the judge who received the meme was the one who turned her in.
Until last Friday, Glennon-Goodman had presided over a pretrial courtroom at the Cook County Criminal Court building after assuming office on February 2, 2024. She ruled mostly on detention petitions and domestic violence cases, while setting release conditions for criminal defendants in the 10th Subcircuit, deciding whether they were jailed, subject to electronic monitoring, or released.
Glennon-Goodman ranked as the second-most lenient judge among the nine in the pretrial division when it came to reviewing detention petitions. Last year, she denied nearly half of all detention requests, while the pretrial division as a whole approved about 66% of such petitions, according to CWBChicago.
Court workers have been informed that a former Cook County state’s attorney, who was elected to a judgeship in the same election cycle as Glennon-Goodman, will be replacing her in the pretrial division, the station reported.
Prior to her judgeship, she served as a Cook County assistant public defender from 1997 until last year, handling murder cases for nearly two decades, and ran unopposed for her first term. Glennon-Goodman, a Democrat, successfully secured re-election for the 10th Subcircuit in the general election held on November 5, 2024, according to Ballotpedia.
Her six-year term ends on December 2, 2030.
The meme she allegedly sent appears to have been screenshotted from a TikTok video.
In his ruling, Chief Judge Evans stated that Glennon-Goodman would receive training on implicit bias, though he didn’t offer specifics, noting that he would refer the case to the Judicial Inquiry Board “to determine whether further sanction is warranted.”
In a statement, the Cook County Bar Association, the area’s most prominent and longest-standing organization of Black attorneys, denounced the offensive image.
“It is our understanding that the photo was meant to be shared with a different audience and that the judge involved has apologized profusely as a result. Nevertheless, such media is inappropriate to share regardless of the intended audience,” the statement said. “Discernment and judgment are of utmost importance for the qualifications of a judge. Any judge should be unbiased enough to not further circulate such a racist trope.”
The meme was reposted on TikTok by the account phillipdavenport5780, though the image itself featured the handle @jarnold397, clouding its point of origin.
“The imagery recalls our nation’s history of inappropriate media images of Black people (such as blackface) and such imagery continues to shape the opinions of Black people, particularly Black men,” the bar association stated.
