A Whiteside County judge on Thursday agreed to dismiss the jury panel from which jurors were to be selected for a still-scheduled June criminal trial, agreeing with the defendant’s attorney that the data used to select Whiteside County jury panels remains flawed.

It is the third jury panel dismissed since March in the aggravated battery case against Michael Cover. Prosecutors are still attempting to bring the case to trial following a September 2025 fight in the Whiteside County Jail.

In making his ruling, Whiteside County Circuit Court Judge James Heuerman said it is ”abundantly clear” that an April 2026 jury panel created for Cover’s June trial was not chosen in the agreed-upon manner as the county works toward ensuring that jurors represent a fair cross section of the community.

The issue first surfaced in February, when in the days leading up to Cover’s Feb. 10 trial date, his attorney, James Mertes of Sterling, discovered the Whiteside County Circuit Clerk’s Office – which is the office responsible for creating the jury panel – had been systematically excluding qualified jurors for more than three decades based on age, economic status, pending civil cases, money owed in court cases and criminal history.

Mertes then began arguing against the county’s jury selection process, saying it fails to gather a jury panel that represents a fair cross section of the community and therefore would deprive his client of being tried fairly.

In the following weeks, two judges agreed, separately discharging jury panels in February and March based on Mertes’s arguments; the latter dismissal order went so far as to state that the Circuit Clerk’s Office’s earlier exclusions violated state and federal law. Alongside those hearings, to rectify another issue in their circuit, the 14th Judicial Circuit’s judges appointed a functioning three-member jury commission in Whiteside County, something the county had not had for several years.

[ Judge says Whiteside County wrongly excluded jurors for years ]

Then, to rectify the selection process, the jury commission in late March requested a fresh, combined list of potential Whiteside County jurors from the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts – the statewide agency responsible for compiling jury lists from voter registration, driver’s license, and unemployment insurance data – and Illinois identification and Illinois Person with a Disability Identification Card holders.

The AOIC provided a list of more than 48,000 names, a number that immediately raised red flags. Whiteside County’s total adult population is about 43,495 people, according to 2020 census data. The list contained about 4,500 more names than the entire adult population of the county.

The Whiteside County Circuit Clerk’s Office was tasked with gathering another jury panel for April. The agreed-upon process would use the master list of names supplied by the AOIC, ChatGPT, and the Whiteside County Circuit’s Clerk’s jury management software to randomly select 200 jurors.

What happened next was the creation of a jury panel that contained at least 60 dead people – including one person who died 35 years ago; no jurors younger than 42; a jury pool with a median age of 72; 52 people who are 90 years or older; and 27 people who would be 100 years or older, including at least one potential juror who would be 135, if they were still living.

During the day-long hearing on Thursday, Mertes said the latest jury panel list revealed another problem: As the Circuit Clerk’s software system was selecting potential jurors for the panel, it wasn’t pulling from just the 2024 AOIC list. It was pulling in jurors who served as far back as 1991. That’s because, unknown to users, the software does not purge older lists that have been input into it.

He said the significance of that means those who died several years ago were not purged out of the system and are continuing to appear on the potential juror list, as are a disproportionate number of older jurors. Mertes argued the issue disproportionately favors older jurors and effectively excludes younger residents.

“All the lottery tickets are being drawn by the elderly and the dead,” he said.

Heuerman agreed when ruling to dismiss the April jury pool. He said Cover’s trial date will remain set for June 9. Another hearing has been set for 9 a.m. on May 21 to continue discussions on how to proceed with creating the jury panel from which the jury will be selected.