All People Deserve Access to Their Rights – Especially Those as Foundational as the Presumption of Innocence
Cook County leads the nation in exonerations based on false confessions. Between 1972 and 1991, Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge tortured at least 119 people – most of whom were young Black men – in order to force false confessions. Cook County still lives in that legacy: Between January 1989 and December 2013, 95 people were exonerated in Cook County. False confessions accounted for almost 40% of these wrongful convictions.
These facts should be of fundamental importance to every lawyer practicing in Cook County and Chicago – including Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Unfortunately, the Mayor ignored our city’s history and the foundation of our legal system – the principle that accused people are “innocent until proven guilty” – when she stated that “when [violent] charges are brought…people are guilty.”
Mayor Lightfoot’s comments were yet another attack on the Pretrial Fairness Act, which will abolish money bail (among other things) starting in 2023. This policy is absolutely essential to ensure that people in Illinois are no longer jailed because they are poor. Pretrial jailing ruins people’s lives by taking them away from their homes, spouses, children, and jobs. More people plead guilty when they’re held in jail before trial, and pretrial jailing leads to longer sentences in general. Data shows that people jailed “for as little as 72 hours” are over two-times more likely to be unemployed the following year.
Not only is mandatory pretrial jailing unconstitutional, but over a quarter (27%) of felony cases in Cook County are dismissed entirely. We ask: How can anyone justify calling for everyone charged with certain felonies to be jailed pretrial when these are the facts?
Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers urge Mayor Lightfoot to back away from these harmful statements. All people deserve access to their rights – especially those as foundational as the presumption of innocence.
Co-written by Tessa Weil-Greenberg, Law Student Intern and rising 3L at Northwestern Law, Sarah Staudt, Director of Policy, and Stephanie Agnew, Director of Communications for Chicago Appleseed.