Two local judges were recently overruled by a Wisconsin appellate court.  It all started when a defense lawyer, Mark Richards, filed a “substitution of judge” request in a criminal case.  Every defendant gets the right to file one substitution, and KCE has learned that most defense lawyers substitute against Judge Angelina Gabriele.  That is what Mark Richards did.  Commissioner Bill Michel found the written request to be “timely filed.”  He then granted it, assigned the case to a different branch of court and scheduled it for the next hearing.  Judge Gabriele then reinserted herself into the case and rejected the substitution request, after the fact, because the case had a codefendant.  When there are co-defendants, both of them have to agree on the substitution, otherwise, the prosecutor might have to

Kenosha criminal defense attorney Michael Cicchini recently had his new article, “The Preliminary-Hearing Swindle: A Crime Against Procedure,” accepted for publication by the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review.  We asked him about his article, and whether the preliminary hearing could have prevented the bogus prosecution of Kenosha college student Marissa Chon. Q:  Near the beginning of your article on preliminary hearings, you quote Ambrose Bierce.  Who is he and what did he say? I’m glad you noticed that!  Ambrose Bierce was a brilliant newspaper editor and author in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  He was famously cynical about the American legal system.  He defined litigation as “a machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.”  And he described a litigant as