CHICAGO - Sherman Skolnick, a corruption-hunting activist credited with pushing two Illinois Supreme Court justices from power, has died. He was 75.

Though journalists often referred to the tireless Skolnick as a conspiracy theorist, it was a title he rejected.

"There's a stigma to being called a conspiracy theorist," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1988. "It's a polite way of calling someone a nut."

Skolnick died in his sleep Sunday at his South Side home, his family said.

Using the Citizens Committee to Clean Up the Courts, a public interest group he founded, he sniffed out scandals and corruption. While his credibility was often undermined by his more outrageous claims - including his insistence that former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington was murdered - he was occasionally proved right.

In 1969, he found out that two judges on the Supreme Court - justices Roy Solfisburg and Ray Klingbiel - had accepted stock in a Chicago bank from a defendant whose case they decided favorably.

The two were eventually forced to resign.