Sheila Murphy to be honored by coalition that advocates end of capital punishment

Retired Cook County judge Sheila M. Murphy, a passionate advocate for human lives and liberties, is about to receive the highest honor that the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty confers.

Murphy, who is of counsel to Rothschild, Barry & Myers in Chicago, will receive the coalition’s Cunningham-Carey Award: Honoring a Vision for Justice during a reception at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, at Maggiano’s Little Italy in Chicago.

In announcing the event, the coalition said Murphy will be honored “for living out the highest ideals of the law while on the bench, in her representation of death row inmates, and in her advocacy for the abolition of capital punishment.”

Her timely intervention a year ago in a Texas case resulted in commutation of the death sentence of a man charged with conspiracy in a robbery that ended in a shooting (ISBA Bar News, October 2007).

The award memorializes the contributions toward promoting humane alternatives to capital punishment by former public defenders Richard E. Cunningham, who died in March 2001, and Jack Carey, who died in January 2002.

Both served on the coalition board and fought against imposition of the death penalty throughout their careers.

Sheila Murphy was presiding judge of Cook County’s 6th Municipal District when she stepped down on Sept. 1, 1999, to become an instructor in a U.S. Department of Justice program on implementing drug and alcohol treatment alternatives for defendants.

A former member of the ISBA Board of Governors, she chaired the Joint Committee on Gender Equality and the Task Force on Gender Bias, and was a founder of the Our Children in the Courts Foundation.

A 1970 graduate of the DePaul University College of Law, she is a former assistant public defender and federal defender panel attorney. She was appointed an associate judge in 1989 and elected to the circuit court in 1992.

Murphy received the John Powers Crowley Award from the Lawyers’ Assistance Program in 1998 after years of service as an ISBA-appointed member of the LAP board.

She received a Founder’s Award from the Chicago Bar Association Alliance for Women in 1996 as a visionary lawyer who has used her influence and authority for the good of other women.

Murphy also has been honored by the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, the Illinois Judicial Council, the Illinois Public Defender Association and the Crisis Center for South Suburbia.

She serves on the advisory board of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, along with retired Supreme Court justice Moses W. Harrison II. ISBA past president Terrence K. Hegarty is a member of the coalition’s board of directors.

A presentation by Hegarty and Thomas P. Sullivan, chair of the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, during the ISBA Annual Meeting in June led the ISBA Assembly to vote in support of legislation to abolish the death penalty.