Criminal Courts Archives - Page 12 of 40 - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

Slowly Returning to Normal: A Look at the Cook County Court Case Backlog in Autumn 2021

As we have reported before, the Cook County Felony Courts saw a massive slowdown in case resolutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because in-person courts were closed for the majority of 2020 and some of 2021, trials became extremely rare. At the same time, other kinds of case dispositions, like gu...

REPORT: 10 Facts about Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Cook County

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and the Chicago Council of Lawyers have released a report, 10 Facts about Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in Cook County, which catalogs data-based facts about the Cook County Sheriff’s Electronic Monitoring (EM) Program to help the public understand the...

Public (In)Access to Judicial Branch Data in Illinois

In 2019, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and our pro bono partner, DLA Piper, looked at the open records laws, the Freedom of Information Act, and other public access policies in all 50 states to determine where Illinois stands in terms of judicial transparency. We found that Illin...

Loyola Report Reveals Undue Punitive Effect of Gun Possession Convictions on Young Black Men in Cook County

As the summer ends, gun violence continues to dominate headlines in Chicago; so far this year, there have been over 2,000 people hurt or killed by shootings. As the city continues to grieve and look for effective and equitable solutions to gun issues, the importance of data-driven policymaking is cr...

You Have the Right to Chronically-Underfunded and Overworked Counsel: The need for improved support of public defense in Cook County and beyond.

BACKGROUND The concept of a public defender is relatively modern in the American legal system. For most of U.S. history, being poor meant defense by an attorney was unavailable to you. That all changed, however, in the seminal case, Gideon v. Wainwright, when the Supreme Court found it to be the...

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