About Me
Tim Capps is a southern Illinois native whose father and grandfathers worked in Franklin County coal mines. After serving in the army with the 101st Airborne Division as an Arabic Linguist, he came back to southern Illinois and received his B.A. in History, followed by his Juris Doctorate in 1989. He immediately entered the Navy JAG Corps where he eventually handled cases in seven different countries and received the New York Bar Association’s Award for Trial Advocacy, the Navy Achievement Medal for his work as a prosecutor, and the Southwest Asia Service Medal for Operation Desert Storm.
Name: Tim Capps
Gender: Male
Age: 49
Birthday: August 12
Status: Married
Hometown: Carbondale, IL
Military: U.S. Navy JAG Corps; U.S. Army 101st Airborne, MOS 98-G (Arabic Linguist)
Occupation: Criminal Defense Lawyer
School: SIU School of Law
Location: Carbondale, IL
Quote: “There are no monsters, only people who, under the wrong circumstances, do very bad things. No one should be judged by the worst thing they ever did.”
Recent Reading: Crunchy Cons, Panzer Aces, The Great Gatsby, The Husband, To Kill a Mockingbird
TV Shows: 24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Office (even the best legal minds need to rest)
Musicians: Ian Anderson, Gillian Welch, Julie Miller
tim@NOSPAMsalukilawyer.com (Please remove “NOSPAM” before you email me, because I already have enough Nigerian financial schemes to keep me busy right now.)
About Tim Capps
Upon return to civilian life in southern Illinois, Tim Capps worked first as a public defender, then as Assistant Illinois Attorney General, prosecuting difficult and high-profile cases throughout the southern part of the state, including his first death penalty case.
Tim Capps went into private practice in 1998 and lost no time in establishing a reputation as a “heavy hitter” criminal defense lawyer. By the time Illinois death penalty reforms had put into place tough new requirements for death penalty defenders, Tim Capps was ready to become one of the first in the area to be certified to act as lead counsel. His expertise has been recognized statewide as a lecturer at death penalty defense seminars in Carbondale, Springfield and Chicago. He is a contributer to “Defending Illinois Death Penalty Cases: Essential Know-How for Illinois Defense Lawyers,” published by Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education.
Tim Capps maintains a relatively light regional caseload that consists primarily of serious felonies, although he is available for DUIs as his other work permits. At any given time, his caseload is likely to have at least one murder, three or four serious drug cases, and several cases involving allegations of sexual abuse or child pornography. He has also defended medical billing fraud in federal court.
He is perhaps best known for successfully avoiding the death penalty in the 1999 Union County child-murder case of People v. Ernst Bruny, which was featured on Oprah, Life Magazine and other national news outlets. In 2003 Capps again garnered attention when a Clinton County jury took less than two hours to find murder defendant Jeremy Pontious not guilty of all charges, despite Pontious’ videotaped confession. (Capps successfully argued that it had been coerced by the police and demonstrated key inconsistencies between it and the facts.)
Tim Capps prefers bow ties for reasons too numerous and improbable to explain, and derives a technological edge from exclusive use of Mac computers.
He is the father of four, three of whom are teenagers at home, and is a reader at Holy Protection Orthodox Church in Royalton, Illinois. Even his hobbies are competitive: he enjoys playing a variety of wargames with his children and other boys who have never managed to outgrow toy soldiers. He is also an infrequent contributer to the local NPR affiliate on legal matters.
