What the Record Establishes
- The notice setting the August 6 appearance contains no remote-access information of any kind.
- Illinois Supreme Court Rule 45(b)(4) provides that such notices shall include the information necessary to appear remotely.
- Every Rule 45 quotation used in the motion was checked string by string against the downloaded official text; eleven of eleven matched.
What They Have Not Produced
- Whether the August 6 setting was remote-eligible.
- If it was exempt, which local rule created the exemption — by number and effective date.
- The host-side platform telemetry for the June 17 setting: join times, waiting-room states, and every admit or remove action.
Rule 45(b)(4) is one sentence and it is imperative. All summonses and notices for proceedings that participants are permitted to attend remotely shall include the information necessary to appear in person or remotely, including whatever is needed to reach the platform. The notice that ordered an appearance in Courtroom 611 on August 6 was issued on July 23 at 11:59 a.m. It has a date, an hour, a courtroom number, a street address, and the clerk’s phone number. It has no platform, no meeting ID, no passcode, no dial-in, no statement that the setting may be attended remotely, and no statement that it may not.
Two possibilities, and the motion refuses to choose
Either the setting was remote-eligible — in which case the notice is defective on its face under 45(b)(4) — or it was exempt, and an exemption exists only where a Chief Judge has made one by local rule under 45(b)(2) and (b)(7). The motion does not pick. It asks whoever asserts the exemption to name the local rule by number and effective date. That is a demand that is either satisfied in writing or fails in writing.
The negative that was deliberately not asserted
The circuit’s own website could not be reached from the machine that built the packet. So nothing in the filing says the circuit has no local rule under 45(b)(7). That negative is unverified, and a motion asserting an unverified negative hands the other side a free win the moment they produce the rule. Instead the burden is left where 45(b)(2) already puts it — on the party claiming the exemption. If they produce a local rule, nothing is lost: the notice still had to say the setting was exempt, and it did not.
Eleven of eleven
Every one of the eleven Rule 45 quotations in the motion and in the exhibit cover was checked, character by character, against the downloaded official compilation, which is itself published in the supporting record with its own provenance note. Eleven matched verbatim. A packet that quotes a rule eleven times and verifies it zero times is a packet that loses on the twelfth page.
Why this connects back to June 17
Rule 45(a)(1) provides that a remote appearance shall be equivalent to an in-person appearance for all purposes. On June 17 the litigant joined at 9:17 a.m. on the only credentials he had; the platform told the host he was there; at 10:25 a.m. he was still in the waiting room; a warrant issued. The rule settles what that was without anyone characterizing anyone’s motives. He appeared. The record that would resolve the rest is the host-side telemetry, and the circuit is the account holder.