James B. Zagel, who as a federal decide sentenced former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich to a hefty 14 years in jail for corruption and who earlier helped prosecute Richard Speck within the grisly killings of eight Chicago scholar nurses, a mass homicide that shocked the nation, died on July 15 at his residence in Chicago. He was 82.

His demise, from coronary heart failure after an extended sickness, was introduced by Rebecca R. Pallmeyer, chief decide of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Judge Zagel, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, had served on that court docket since 1987. He assumed senior standing in 2016.

Judge Zagel was broadly thought to be a smart and witty Renaissance man who discovered time to put in writing a potboiler novel and who not solely served as a decide but in addition performed one, within the 1989 film thriller “The Music Box.” A District Court colleague, Judge Manish Shah, remarked in an e-mail that Judge Zagel “could quote Ludwig Wittgenstein and Groucho Marx with an easy charm.”

As a decide, he gained extensive consideration presiding over the trial of former Governor Blagojevich.

After a jury deadlocked in 2010 on all however one cost in an earlier trial, Mr. Blagojevich, who had been impeached and faraway from workplace, was convicted on 18 counts in a retrial in 2011. He was accused of corruption for leveraging his powers to counterpoint himself and a bunch of cronies by means of marketing campaign contributions and different private positive factors in alternate for favoring allies in insurance policies relating to hospitals and a racetrack.

The prosecution’s case centered on allegations that Mr. Blagojevich had tried to promote the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois that had been vacated by Barack Obama upon Mr. Obama’s election to president in 2008.

Technically, the crimes for which the governor was convicted might have resulted in life imprisonment, however the 14-year sentence imposed by Judge Zagel, although a shock to many, was in reality solely simply wanting what prosecutors had requested.

The sentence was considered as a message to Illinois voters and politicians who had tolerated corruption for many years.

“The harm here is not measured in the value of property or money,” Judge Zagel mentioned earlier than passing sentence. “The harm is the erosion of public trust in government.”

After proclaiming for years that he was harmless, Mr. Blagojevich apologized to his household and to his Illinois constituents.

“I was the governor,” he mentioned, “and I should have known better.”

He was released from prison in 2020 after President Donald J. Trump commuted his sentence.

Among a whole lot of instances, Judge Zagel presided over the so-called Operation Family Secrets trial, which led to 2007 with the convictions of 5 prime associates of a mob group referred to as the Chicago Outfit on conspiracy expenses involving greater than a dozen murders. Judge Zagel sentenced one of many defendants, 71-year-old Frank Calabrese Sr., who was often called Frankie Breeze, to life in jail for what the decide described as “unspeakable” acts.

James Block Zagel was born on March 4, 1941, in Chicago. His father, Samuel, was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who owned a furnishings retailer. His mom was Ethel (Samuels) Zagel.

He earned bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1962 and a regulation diploma from Harvard Law School in 1965.

As an assistant state’s legal professional in Cook County, Ill., from 1965 to 1969, Judge Zagel was a part of a staff that prosecuted Richard Speck, who was convicted in 1967 and sentenced to demise within the killings of the scholar nurses. He had damaged into their Chicago townhouse, sure them with strips of bedsheets and led them one after the other into different rooms, the place he raped one of many ladies and both strangled or stabbed — or each — all of them. He died in prison at 49 in 1991.

The Speck case helped set up Judge Zagel’s popularity as an professional in forensic science, psychology and the reconciliation of constitutional doctrine and prison process.

On his appointment to the federal bench, he was director of the Illinois State Police, serving from 1980 to 1987. He was director of the state’s Department of Revenue in 1979. He sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from 2008 to 2015.

He and his first spouse, Pam Zekman, an investigative reporter, divorced in 1975. He is survived by his spouse of 44 years, Margaret Maxwell Zagel, a lawyer, who is called Peggy.

Judge Zagel had his first style of Hollywood — beneath the stage identify J.S. Block — in “The Music Box,” directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Jessica Lange. Judge Zagel performed a jurist presiding over a listening to to revoke the American citizenship of a person accused of warfare crimes in Hungary throughout World War II.

Again beneath the identify J.S. Block, he performed the grieving son of a homicide sufferer in David Mamet’s movie “Homicide” (1991).

In 2002, Judge Zagel printed “Money to Burn,” a novel a few federal decide who concocts a daring theft of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Kirkus Reviews referred to as it “a deft, elegantly written tour de force.”