Chicago Dept. of Administrative Hearings · sourced from a single Chicago FOIA request
Same ticket. Different judge.
Three times the odds of losing.
Chicago decides whether you owe a parking or camera ticket through an administrative hearings system. The Mayor appoints the Department director (subject to City Council approval); the director appoints the hearing officers; and the officers are then assigned to individual cases through a step we have not found in the City's published rules. We pulled 1,198,179 hearings from Jan 10, 2019 through Sep 9, 2025 via Chicago FOIA.
Within a single type of ticket — same statute, same fact pattern, same defenses available — the biggest factor in whether you are found liable is which officer your case gets assigned to. The spread between the harshest and most lenient officer is enormous, and it shows up in every slice of the data.
Both were full-time Chicago hearing officers during the period covered by this data. Both decided thousands of cases. The same defenses were available to motorists appearing in front of either one. The spread is not noise; it is the system.
The shape of the disparity
Every officer who decided parking or camera cases between Jan 10, 2019 and Sep 9, 2025, ranked by share of cases they found "Liable." Each bar is one person. The vertical line marks the citywide average liable rate of 44.0%.
The number under each officer's name is their lifetime case count. Nine officers decided fewer than 500 cases over the entire 6.5-year window — their bars are shown in light grey. Their rates are real but more sensitive to randomness on small samples, so we exclude them from the headline "highest" and "lowest" rankings.
Pick the right denominator
Before reading any one number, it helps to know which slice of the file you're looking at. The same 1.2M-row file produces four very different "liable rates" depending on which cases you include:
The "majority of contests win" framing usually refers to parking-ticket hearings on the merits, where motorists win about two out of three. The full-population 44% liable rate is dragged up by red-light and speed-camera cases (~277,000 of the 1.2M) which are 80%+ liable because the only winning defenses (stolen vehicle, factually inconsistent photo) rarely apply. The per-officer disparities below hold on every subset.
Same violation, different judge, up to 12× different odds
The obvious objection — "different officers hear different kinds of cases" — does not survive the data. Holding violation type constant, the spread is just as large.
| Officer | Hearings | Liable rate |
|---|---|---|
| Lonathan D. Hurse | 1,312 | 82.8% |
| Harriet J. Parker | 786 | 67.9% |
| Robert A. Sussman | 5,166 | 46.7% |
| — citywide median ~25.0% — | ||
| Bernadette Freeman | 3,204 | 8.3% |
| Karen L. Riley | 2,082 | 7.5% |
| Michael Quinn | 15,215 | 6.9% |
For an identical violation type, one motorist faces an 83% chance of losing; another faces a 7% chance of losing. Same city, same statute, same available defenses.
| Officer | Hearings | Liable rate |
|---|---|---|
| Lonathan D. Hurse | 394 | 93.1% |
| Hugo Chaviano | 1,656 | 87.1% |
| Robert A. Sussman | 2,241 | 80.2% |
| — citywide median ~66.0% — | ||
| Karen L. Riley | 666 | 34.8% |
| Michael Quinn | 5,633 | 26.0% |
Within-violation spread (officers with ≥200 cases of that violation)
A 60-to-76-point spread on a single violation, with the violation held constant, cannot be explained by differences in the underlying tickets. The differences trace back to the officer hearing the case.
Pick two judges. Watch them year after year.
One other obvious objection — "maybe an officer just had a rough year" — also does not survive. We picked two officers with multi-year tenure on opposite ends of the leaderboard and pulled their liable rate for each calendar year separately.
Michael Quinn never found more than 35% of motorists Liable in any year. Robert A. Sussman never found fewer than 56% Liable. The citywide average drifted from 48% down to 35–39% over the period, but Quinn stayed below it every year and Sussman stayed well above it every year he served. The two trajectories never come close to crossing.
Sussman does not appear in the data after 2023; he is no longer in the role. Quinn served the full 6.5-year window. The same pattern shows up in every officer with a multi-year tenure on either end of the leaderboard: Karen L. Riley (2023–2025, 27.9%–31.3% — always lenient), Rodney Stewart (2019–2025, 45.2%–65.8% — always harsher than citywide), and others. Each officer stays in their lane.
What this means in plain language
What this is not
- Not a claim of bad faith by any individual hearing officer. The data shows outcomes, not intent.
- Not a judgment about whether the harshest officers are wrong or the most lenient are right. The point is that the system is producing inconsistent outcomes for similarly situated motorists — a procedural-fairness concern regardless of which direction the variance runs.
- Not a complete picture of the hearings system. Limited to parking and automated-camera dockets; does not cover boots, impoundments, or building-code matters.
The underlying data, free to republish
The full data package — the per-officer table, the per-officer × violation breakdown, the per-officer × contest-method breakdown, and the FOIA paper trail — is hosted here. Anyone is welcome to audit, republish, or extend it.
Methodology & sources
Source. City of Chicago Department of Administrative Hearings, parking and automated-camera disposition records, released by the City of Chicago in response to FOIA request H118909-110325, filed Nov 3, 2025 ("All hearing outcomes parking / traffic / camera 2019–present"). The City's response was issued under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (5 ILCS 140), the statute that governs FOIA requests in Illinois.
Schema. One row per hearing. Fields: ticket number, issue datetime, street address, ward, violation code and description, disposition datetime, contest method (mail / in-person / virtual), hearing officer name, hearing location, disposition (Liable / Not Liable / Denied / etc.), reason, and note. No imputation or smoothing was performed.
Liable rate. count(disposition = 'Liable') / count(*) per officer. "Denied" is a procedural outcome (e.g., late filing) — treated as neither a win nor a loss for the motorist, so denied cases sit in the denominator but not the numerator.
Sample floor. Officers with fewer than 500 lifetime hearings are excluded from headline rankings to avoid small-sample artifacts; the full file lists all 74.
Date range. Jan 10, 2019 – Sep 9, 2025.
Officer-name normalization. Names are reported as they appear in the FOIA file. One officer appears under two names — Heather Neaveill-Kramer (Jan 2019 through 2021) and Heather Neaveill (2021 through Jan 2022). The date ranges and overlap suggest a single person under two recorded names, but we have not merged the rows. A trailing space in Zedrick T. Braden was trimmed for display only.
Reproduction. The CSVs above and the SQL queries in HOW_TO_VERIFY.md reproduce every figure on this page. Discrepancies from a reproduction run should be reported back so the source can be re-checked.
The same data, arranged for reporters. The hearing-officer lottery ranks every officer as a single liable/dismissed bar and offers the underlying FOIA files for download.