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Chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois

Judge William J. Campbell Courtesy of the Seventh Circuit Library.

On September 9, 1968, three days after the Daley administration released its report blaming the violence at the Democratic National Convention on outside agitators, Chief Judge William Campbell of the Northern District of Illinois convened a grand jury to investigate the demonstrators’ possible violation of the federal anti-riot law and the police’s possible infringement of civil rights. During the convention, Campbell had refused to restrain the police from interfering with reporters. Following release of the Walker Report that attributed much of the violence to the police, Campbell publicly questioned the motivation for release of the report before it was presented to the grand jury, and he suggested that the grand jury might investigate whether the release of the report was an attempt to influence the same grand jury’s investigation of the convention violence. After the grand jury indicted eight demonstrators and eight policemen, the court’s random assignment procedure originally selected Campbell as the judge for the trial of the eight defendants, but Campbell recused himself because of his detailed knowledge of the evidence presented to the grand jury. As chief judge of the court during the conspiracy trial, Campbell had authority over the rules regulating media access, and he prohibited cameras and sound equipment from public areas of the courthouse.

Campbell was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Campbell was born in Chicago and received his law degree from Loyola University. He served as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois for two years before his appointment to the district court. Campbell assumed a reduced caseload in March 1970, but he continued to serve as a senior judge until his death.