Illinois legislature Archives - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

We’ve Joined 400+ Organizations in Urging the Illinois Supreme Court to Affirm the Constitutionality of the Pretrial Fairness Act

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers have joined the 37 members of the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice and 389 other national, state, and local organizations in submitting an amicus brief to the Illinois Supreme Court in the case of Rowe vs. Raoul, which...

REPORT: Reducing Barriers to Recovery — Shifting Low-Level Drug Possession from Felonies to Misdemeanors in Illinois

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, the ACLU of Illinois, the Cook County Department of Public Health, and the Illinois Justice Project have released our joint report, Reducing Barriers to Recovery – Shifting Low-Level Drug Possession From Felonies to Misdemeanors in Illinois. Our report provi...

Dynamics of Drug Possession Charges in Illinois, from Investigatory Stops to Sentences

B A C K G R O U N D Illinois is one of 18 states that makes possession of drugs (except cannabis) a felony in all cases. This means that possession, even of very small amounts of drugs, can lead to serious criminal legal system involvement. Felony arrests lead to pretrial jail time, often bec...

Illinois HB 163: Criminal Justice Omnibus

UPDATED: On January 13, 2020, the Illinois General Assembly voted to pass HB 3653, an amended version of HB 163, including the Pretrial Fairness Act (SFA2) which ends money bond. The Governor is expected to sign the legislation. Click here for more on the bill that passed. The criminal justic...

Elections and Judicial Integrity

Last week, the Sun-Times ran a piece about the new pension-reform law, examining the overlap judicial election campaign contributors and pension-stakeholders, in the context of a potential lawsuit challenging the pension-reform law. The piece raises some important questions of how judicial campaign...

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