photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

left to right: Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden, George Burgess, attorney Dakota Loomis, District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, and Judge Sally Pokorny on May 31, 2024.

The rape trial for former Illinois star basketball player Terrence Shannon will begin Monday at 9 a.m. sharp, after a Douglas County judge pointedly denied the state’s attempt to continue it.

In her ruling Tuesday, Judge Amy Hanley also raised implicit questions about the District Attorney’s Office’s ability to have qualified attorneys at the ready for contingencies that arise in court schedules.

Part of Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden’s reason for seeking the continuance was that his having to represent the state at Shannon’s trial would mean that his co-counsel in a different rape case — the case of George Burgess, whose trial started May 28 — would have to work solo for a day or two in that case, which he said was not feasible due to the “division of labor” the two had worked out.

Seiden’s co-counsel in that other case, as both defense attorney Thomas Bath and Hanley pointed out, is the district attorney of Douglas County: Suzanne Valdez.

“Seems like the district attorney could handle four witnesses, and that would make Mr. Seiden available Monday,” Bath told Hanley, as he opposed the motion to continue the trial even by two days. In the event of the continuance being denied, Seiden — Valdez’s right-hand man — had asked to start on Wednesday instead of Monday, believing he’d be done in the Burgess trial by then.

Bath, however, pointed to several instances where the state had assured the defense that it would be ready to go to trial on Monday, and he noted that some witnesses, including the defendant, were coming from out of state.

Hanley ultimately agreed that because the Burgess case has two prosecutors — and “one of them is the district attorney,” who will have ample time to prepare to go solo in the Burgess case — that the state had not shown good cause for delay and that the state was expected to appear Monday for jury selection in the Shannon case.

Seiden tried to take issue with Hanley, asking her if it was going to be the norm going forward that cases would be assigned to different judges when such scheduling conflicts arose. Hanley told Seiden she was not going to address that issue, but Seiden persisted, bringing up the issue two more times, and even turning to Chief Judge James McCabria, who was sitting in the gallery as a spectator, to address the issue. McCabria, who was not the presiding judge, remained silent, presumably in deference to his colleague on the bench.

Hanley told Seiden a total of three times that she was not going to address the matter, prompting Seiden, after Hanley had adjourned the hearing, to approach McCabria in the gallery and ask him if they could discuss it. A clearly upset Seiden told McCabria he’d “shoot” an email to him, then exited the courtroom.

The scheduling conflict arose because both the Burgess case, involving allegations of child rape, and the Shannon case, involving allegations that the then-basketball player sexually assaulted a woman at a Lawrence bar, were both assigned to Judge Sally Pokorny. The Burgess trial, which began last week, was supposed to be concluded well before the Shannon trial got underway, but because Burgess became ill on Monday, the remainder of his trial, likely just a day or two, was pushed out a week, to the same day that Shannon’s trial was scheduled to start.

The Shannon case was then reassigned, earlier Tuesday, to Hanley’s courtroom.

Chief Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Tatum originally represented the state in the Shannon case, but Tatum, an experienced prosecutor, resigned in March, just days after Valdez’s office lost a high-profile murder case in which a jury acquitted a teen of murdering a 14-year-old Black boy. A month later, another one of the DA’s office’s murder cases ended in an acquittal: the case of a transient man who had been accused of killing another man last summer in downtown Lawrence.

As the Journal-World has reported, the Burgess trial is now in flux because of issues related to the sickness delay, including the continued availability of some jurors in the case.