Latest News - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

A New Mandatory Minimum for Gun Crime Will Cause Further Pre-Trial Delay And Jail Overcrowding

With the support of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, HB2265 / SB 1342 was recently introduced to the Illinois General Assembly with the goal of imposing a mandatory three-year minimum prison sentence for people convicted of illegal use of a weapon. Our friends at the John Howard Association—in recent articles o...

Thanks for a Great Annual Luncheon!

Thanks for making our Annual Luncheon last week successful. We're especially grateful for Greg Berman of the Center for Court Innovation for his great remarks about the relationship of crime rates, recidivism and alternatives to incarceration. We hope you all found the remarks as interesting as we...

How Illinois Supreme Court Intervention Can Help Cook County

How Illinois Supreme Court Intervention Can Help Cook County In response to President Preckwinkle’s letter to the Illinois Supreme Court, Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride has answered, proposing a meeting of the major criminal justice stakeholders and a conference of regional and national experts to d...

Charging for a Public Defense: The Impossible Choice Facing Indigent Defendants in Cook County

Today at DNAinfo Chicago, reporter Erin Meyer covers Chicago Appleseed’s recent investigation into judges denying public defenders to defendants without conducting the constitutionally-required indigence hearings. As mentioned previously on this blog, Chief Judge of the Cook County Circuit Court,...

Annual Luncheon on October 1st

The Chicago Council of Lawyers and Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice will host the 2013 Annual Meeting on Tuesday, October 1st. Greg Berman, Director of the Center for Court Innovation, will deliver the keynote address. You can purchase tickets to the luncheon by downloading this form or emailing...