SPRINGFIELD — A Sangamon County judge held the director of the state’s child protective agency in contempt of court Thursday for the department’s ongoing mishandling of a records request by Capitol News Illinois.
“I understand this is not a department with 10 employees. It’s a department with thousands of people who work there, but the buck stops at the director’s office,” Judge Jack Davis said Thursday in explaining his indirect civil contempt finding, a decision that found the agency director willfully violated a court order and allows remedies to ensure future compliance.
Davis ruled Director Heidi Mueller’s Department of Children and Family Services violated his June 10 order requiring DCFS to release personnel records for two caseworkers involved in the death of Mackenzi Felmlee, and pay attorney costs, fees and a $5,000 civil penalty within 30 days. The order came after DCFS attorneys failed to appear at multiple hearings.
Mueller took the witness stand on Thursday and blamed a long series of missteps by DCFS administrative employees for why the department failed to appear. She said she learned about the case the day after Capitol News Illinois reported on Davis’ Aug. 11 ruling that required her to appear in court and explain why the department was not following his June order.
Davis said he was willing to give DCFS the “benefit of the doubt,” saying the failures that happened prior to Aug. 12 “can be classified, I think accurately, as ineptness and as incompetence, a lack of oversight, a lack of communication” — but not as “willful” contempt.
But he also faulted the agency for failing to produce records within five days of learning of the court action and for still not having paid the civil penalties he ordered nearly 80 days after the director confirmed she learned of his order.
“As of August 12, the buck had been sufficiently transferred up the chain of command to the desk where it stops,” he said, later adding that noncompliance after that point equates to “willful” contempt.
History of the case
The case dates back to March, when CNI sued the agency for erroneously denying its Freedom of Information Act request by citing, among other points of denial, that the news organization’s records request had not requested records.
Springfield attorney Don Craven’s office, which is representing CNI, served DCFS with a summons on March 23, but the department did not respond to that lawsuit. That led CNI to file a motion for default judgment and to once again cause the agency to be served.
Those documents were handled by an administrative assistant, but the agency said they were never properly logged or sent to DCFS’ legal team. Mueller said the initial summons was found on the desk of an administrative assistant at its Springfield office, where it sat for months.
Her executive assistant, who died unexpectedly last fall, had been in charge of overseeing nonlawyer administrative staff, she said. The administrative team that took over the process didn’t handle it properly, Mueller testified, adding they’ve since put a new process in place.
“I did not ignore it and my legal team didn’t ignore it. It was served on an administrative assistant who didn’t know, who didn’t handle it properly,” Mueller said. “There wasn’t an intentional attempt to ignore it.”
Davis also grew annoyed with the department’s filing — or lack thereof — of a motion to vacate his June 10 order.
Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Haas, who represented DCFS, filed the petition electronically after 5 p.m. Wednesday, arguing the agency complied with the order by releasing heavily redacted documents.
But it never reached Davis’ desk until Thursday morning’s hearing, during which Haas handed him a copy.
“It seems to kind of work in lockstep with the history of what the department has done by taking a laissez-faire approach,” Davis said.
It’s at least the second time in the last five years a judge has found a DCFS director in contempt of court. In 2022, then-Director Marc Smith was assessed contempt charges after the agency failed to follow a Cook County judge’s order to place children discharged from psychiatric hospitals into appropriate care settings. Those charges were later overturned by an appellate court.
Gov. JB Pritzker stuck by Smith until Smith resigned in October 2023. Mueller was appointed in early 2024.
“The core of the legal matter – which was the release of documents – was completed by DCFS on September 3, 2026, and Director Mueller has the full confidence of the Governor,” a spokesperson for Pritzker said in a statement.
Tardy records and payments
As for the denied Freedom of Information Act request, Mueller said that a staff member filling in for the department’s FOIA officer, who was at a conference at the time, sent a template response to CNI denying the records request.
“We had previously created an electronic system with dropdowns to help us manage the huge volume of FOIA requests that we get,” she said. “She clicked the wrong dropdown and it produced automatically a letter that was incorrect.”
Mueller acknowledged that was a mistake and the department should’ve produced the records. DCFS produced the records in early September, months after the initial request, with heavy redactions, though state law and the judge’s order require FOIA requests to be fulfilled within five business days.
Haas said the FOIA officer was dealing with a medical issue in August, which caused the delay in responding once the department learned of the lawsuit.
“You don’t get to just say ‘oops,'” Craven told Davis on why the late-arriving documents proved willful contempt.
Craven said the case is the “epitome of bad faith” by DCFS.
Mueller also said DCFS intends to pay the court-ordered fines and fees, which it has not, leading Davis to ask why DCFS is “picking and choosing” which parts of the order it has followed thus far.
Haas said she believed she was negotiating the fees with Craven, sending a settlement offer that the news organization ultimately denied in mid-October.
Davis set a 30-day deadline for DCFS to comply with the records request and court-ordered fines and fees. The next hearing is scheduled for Dec. 4 to determine whether the contempt charge will be purged.
The judge granted Capitol News Illinois’ Thursday motion to amend its initial request to receive further documents regarding Felmlee’s care.
Mackenzi Felmlee’s care
CNI requested the documents while trying to learn more about the care Felmlee, 18, received before she was found dead in her Fairview Heights foster home in May 2024.
Her foster mother, Shemeka Williams, and foster grandmother, Cornelia Reid, are charged with murder in connection with Mackenzi’s death. Both are being held in the St. Clair County Jail. Williams was licensed through Lutheran Child and Family Services, a nonprofit agency that provides foster care services on contract for DCFS.
According to a timeline of the incident released by DCFS, Williams purportedly told an LCFS caseworker during an in-person visit that Mackenzi was “struggling” two days before her death.
The caseworker, however, did not document that conversation until five days after Mackenzi’s death. LCFS later reported the visit was made by phone, not in person.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.