[3] During this period, he also worked as an appellate law clerk, public defender, special master in chancery, manager of two banks, and farm-owner.

He successfully ran in 1990 to succeed retiring Illinois Supreme Court Justice Howard C. Ryan, for whom he had previously clerked.

[4] He billed himself as a "Common Sense Choice" for north-central Illinois and won that election against Tobias Barry by less than one percentage point.

Heiple notably wrote how the state's adoption laws "are designed to protect natural parents in their preemptive rights to their own children wholly apart from any consideration of the so-called best interests of the child.

[7] The judgment led to criticism among the general populace and public disagreement between Heiple and elected officials, including Jim Edgar, the Governor of Illinois at the time.

[8] The Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board investigated complaints in 1996 that Heiple abused his position during several traffic stops and disobeyed police.

[11] The formal complaint filed that same month discussed the various traffic stops in Pekin and various western Illinois counties.

[5] Heiple died on January 18, 2021, at the OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Illinois.