* Click here for the filing…

* Tribune…

“For at least the past two decades, the press coverage of Madigan has bordered on obsession,” defense attorneys for Madigan and co-defendant Michael McClain wrote in a filing late Monday, calling the coverage “intense and grossly unfair.” […]

But the bulk of the publicity that defense attorneys complained about centered on Madigan, who spent decades at the top of the Springfield hierarchy and statewide Democratic politics.

The coverage – along with attack ads from Republican opponents – cemented Madigan’s image as an iron-fisted boss who derived power from a political machine, an image that could be hard for potential jurors to shake, the filing wrote. […]

The pretrial filings in Madigan’s case have also been written about at length; Tribune journalists, who have no obligation to hide the details of publicly available records, recently described a wiretapped recording that Madigan’s attorneys are trying to prevent jurors from hearing. That seemed to particularly draw the defense attorneys’ ire.

* From the filing…

The first step in determining if a potential juror may have biases that cannot be set aside is reviewing their public facing social media information. Potential jurors who publicly share their negative feelings of Madigan are less likely to be able to put their biases aside and judge Madigan fairly and impartially. Such individuals need to be identified and questioned about their opinions of Madigan during the individualized questioning. The next step is to ask several detailed questions in the written questionnaire regarding potential jurors’ exposure to Madigan and this case. These questions need to be asked in a variety of ways to determine if the potential 14 jurors have any strong feelings or preconceptions resulting from the negative media coverage of Madigan and all of the related criminal cases covered by the news media. If the potential juror has been exposed to this negative information, detailed questioning through voir dire is necessary to evaluate the credibility of each potential juror and assess their ability to evaluate the evidence presented at trial.

Thoughts?