Roy Solfisburg

Solfisburg was elected to the Illinois Supreme Court in 1960, the first time in the states history a sitting Justice was defeated by a challenger.

In 1956, he won a by-election held to fill a vacancy in the position of Circuit Judge for the 16th Judicial Division; he was re-elected in 1957.

(Senators Everett Dirksen and Charles H. Percy both encouraged President Richard Nixon to appoint Solfisburg to the Supreme Court.)

In 1969, Sherman Skolnick, head of the Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts, examined the stockholder records and discovered that both Solfisburg and Justice Klingbiel owned stock in the CCB.

Skolnick contacted several members of the media, and the story was broken in the Alton Evening-Telegraph before being picked up by all the major papers.

(Ironically, the regular commission that investigated judicial malfeasance was chaired by Associate Justice Klingbiel, who was also accused of wrongdoing by Skolnick.)

In 1969, the Greenberg Commission, appointed by the Illinois Supreme Court to investigate Sherman Skolnick's corruption allegations leveled at former Chief Justice Ray Klingbiel and current Chief Justice Roy J. Solfisburg, Jr., named Stevens as their counsel, meaning that he essentially served as the commission's special prosecutor.

[4] The Commission was widely thought to be a whitewash, but Stevens proved them wrong by vigorously prosecuting the justices, forcing them from office in the end.

[11] As a result of the prominence he gained during the Greenberg Commission, Stevens became Second Vice President of the Chicago Bar Association in 1970.

Klingbiel retired and Solfisburg returned to practice law and financially recover from the legal cost of his five successful defenses.