Tag Archives: Pretrial Fairness

On July 1, 2022, the Pretrial Practices Data Oversight Board (“Board”) released a preliminary report in an effort to satisfy statutory requirements laid out in the Pretrial Fairness Act sections of Public Act 101-0652, known as the SAFE-T Act. Per the new law, the Board, convened last July by the Ad...

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...

On Monday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot held a press conference in response to the rising gun violence in Chicago, calling for an increase in pretrial jailing through a “moratorium” on pretrial electronic monitoring and doubling down on antiquated economic punishments, like civil asset forfeiture fo...

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...