Cook County Courts Massively Behind Schedule on Criminal Cases

Criminal Justice ,

By Sarah Staudt, Senior Policy Analyst & Staff Attorney

The Cook County Criminal courts are disturbingly behind on resolving criminal cases. In April 2020, the Cook County Circuit Court, like many courts around the country, closed its doors for all but the “most urgent matters” – primarily bond court, new arraignments in felony cases, and emergency bond reviews for people in custody at the Cook County Jail. Although all criminal courtrooms officially reopened for virtual court by July, the total number of cases processed remains shockingly low. This backlog is creating and perpetuating serious injustices for the people charged with crimes, the people victimized by crime, and the city as a whole.

Cook County Courts’ Growing Backlog of Criminal Cases

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s (CCSAO) public data shows that in a “normal” year (2018-2019), the Cook County Criminal Courts enter an average of 6,966 case dispositions between April 1 and June 30. This number includes dismissals, guilty pleas, and trials. In 2020, the courts resolved only 477 cases – about 7% of their usual total.

The court has been closed for jury trials since the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest in mid-March, and throughout April, May, and June, most courtrooms were only hearing emergency matters that did not involve calling witnesses.[1] Still, it is not only the lack of trials that has caused this drastic drop in case resolutions. Throughout the Court’s closure, judges have been ordered to accept guilty pleas and case dismissals, which can easily happen in short court proceedings over Zoom (the virtual court platform).

Guilty pleas usually constitute about 63% of case resolutions. Between April and June of 2020, there have been only 138 guilty pleas—just 29% of the total dispositions in those months and 96% fewer pleas than were completed on average in April, May, and June in previous years. There are, of course, a fewer number of cases starting at this time – during the pandemic – but the difference is not nearly as sharp. On average, the courts arraigned 5,557 cases between April and June of both 2018 and 2019. This year, the courts arraigned 1,567 – about a quarter as many cases as usual. At this time, the Cook County Circuit  Court would need to resolve cases at 3-4 times the speed they were this April and May to match the case resolution rates of previous years. 

The situation did not improve in July or August. The Cook County Sheriff’s public data shows 6,380 people left the jail or the electronic monitoring (EM) program in 2018. These individuals left for various reasons – because they paid a bond, because they were transferred to prison, or because their case was resolved by being dismissed or they were sentenced to probation. This July, about one-third as many people – only 1,169 people – were discharged from EM or jail.[2] This means that more people are staying on Electronic Monitoring and in the Cook County Jail longer. Over time, as new people have entered the Jail and not enough leave, the population has increased to higher than it was in April. 

Need to Decarcerate the Cook County Jail and the Sheriff’s EM Program

The untenable backlog created by a stalled court presents an incredibly dangerous situation for people inside the jail. As of September 14, the Cook County Jail population is 5,360 people – as high as it was during the height of the outbreak. When COVID-19 is inevitably reintroduced to the Jail, the higher population will, again, make social distancing impossible and will accelerate the spread of the virus. Several legal system actors have the power to mitigate this risk. State’s Attorney Foxx, for example, has the authority to identify cases where individuals need to be released from custody or have their cases resolved to get people out of the jail as quickly as possible to avoid another catastrophic outbreak. Similarly, Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans can set expectations for his judges, re-assign judges who are not resolving cases quickly enough, and collect and publish data.

Meanwhile, the Cook County Sheriff’s house arrest numbers remain higher than ever. People forced to participate in the Sheriff’s Electronic Monitoring/Home Detention program are not allowed to leave their homes to do basic activities of life – shopping for groceries, doing laundry, looking for work, or attending medical appointments – without a court order and/or rigorously-detailed written documentation. EM is a massive intrusion on individuals’ liberties and creates particularly unusual hardship during COVID-19. Over two-thirds of the people currently on EM in Cook County have been in the program continuously, without any program violations, for over 3-months and 12% – 371 people – have been on EM continuously for over year.[3] It is unacceptable for the courts to leave people languishing, pretrial, on electronic monitoring unless a judge has determined, explicitly, that it is absolutely necessary that the person to remain confined in their home.

According to Cook County Jail and electronic monitoring program rosters Chicago Appleseed obtained via FOIA request from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, there are hundreds of people currently in custody who could be released if the court system prioritized decarceration. As of August 31, there are almost 500 people in jail or on EM for either a drug or retail thefts case: in CCJ, at least 224 people are in custody for only narcotics cases and 38 people in custody for only retail theft cases; on the Sheriff’s Electronic Monitoring program, there are 188 people charged with only narcotics cases and 45 charged only with retail theft.

During the pandemic, Cook County has also been increasing the jail population by giving people money bonds they cannot afford. As of August 31, approximately 1,220 people were held only because they could not afford to pay the amount of the money bond. About half of those people (636) needed $10,000 or less to bond out. An additional 1,031 people are being held on a mix of judicially-imposed money bonds and “no bond holds.” These people must be evaluated by judges to determine whether there is any legal basis for holding them in the jail. If a legitimate risk exists – like that a person will flee the jurisdiction or harm another person if released – the Court should conduct a hearing of evidence on why detention is necessary, and, if detention is deemed appropriate, clearly state the reasoning on the record.

Increasingly, people in Cook County are incarcerated pretrial for as long or longer as they likely would have been incarcerated after a plea of guilty and sentencing. When people are incarcerated pretrial (including on house arrest through the CCSO EM program), they receive credit towards any possible prison sentence. Given the length of Cook County cases and the structure of Illinois law, it is not uncommon for people to be sentenced to prison who, in practice, do not serve any actual time because they already served the requisite number of days to satisfy their sentence before the trial. According to jail rosters dated August 31, there are at least 17 people in the jail and 46 people on EM as of August 31 whose highest charge is a Class A misdemeanor and who have already incarcerated 6-months – the general maximum amount of time that a person can spend in jail for a misdemeanor, assuming that they receive typical sentence credits.

People charged with Class 4 felonies in Illinois are only rarely sentenced to more than one year in prison, which translates to 6-months actual time served; 50% of Class 4 felony pleas are for probation and an additional 28% plead guilty to serve a year in prison. There were 120 people in jail as of August 31 charged with Class 4 felonies who have been incarcerated for more than 6-months, and amazingly, 396 people on house arrest who are charged with Class 4 felonies and have been incarcerated for 6-months or more. For class 3 felonies, the statistics are similar: 68 people have served more than one year in jail pretrial, which would be the equivalent of the minimum 2-year prison sentence; 126 people on EM are in the same situation. These numbers are growing every day as cases continue to languish.

Strategies to Protect Public Health

Cook County’s failure to resolve cases in an appropriately-timely manner is not only a health and safety issue for people who are incarcerated, it is also an issue of justice. Americans have a right to a speedy trial – a relatively prompt resolution of the charges against them. Normally, that right is safeguarded by a set of speedy trial laws that put strict time limits on prosecutors and require them to take cases to trial within 4-to-6 months if the defendant requests it. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Illinois Supreme Court suspended these laws, citing the dangers of holding trials – particularly jury trials – in the height of a global pandemic. But the Speedy Trial right cannot simply remain discarded forever, as it is an important procedural safeguard: it helps make sure that people are not left in custody for too much time pretrial and also makes sure cases are decided while evidence is still relatively ‘fresh’—particularly when witnesses, both police officers and civilians, are involved. Resolving criminal cases promptly is also, of course, important for crime victims, who often exist in emotional limbo until the case involving them is resolved. Jurisdictions around the country are slowly experimenting with safe ways to conduct criminal trials, and Cook County needs to seriously consider developing safe, just options to preserve defendants’ rights. 

Bench trials, with judges instead of juries, are a safe way to resolve cases if the defendant agrees. Bench Trials are normally quite common in the Cook County courts; about 89% of cases that have gone to trial since 2011 have gone before a judge rather than a jury. With sufficient protections and social distancing for witnesses, bench trials should be recognized as feasible during the pandemic, even if they must happen at a slightly slower rate than is typical. Regardless of whether or not trials can proceed, however, the vast majority of cases in the system can still be finalized. Only 9% of cases that end in a conviction or acquittal actually go to trial; the vast majority of people plead guilty and almost half of them (44%) plead to probation sentences instead of incarceration. The courts have been open for plea negotiations since July 1. There is really no excuse for the extremely slow rate of case resolution in Cook County. All stakeholders need to come together to quickly eliminate the backlog of cases currently languishing in the pretrial process.

Because of the magnitude of the backlog, even if courts were to simply restart their normal level of functioning, they would not be able to catch up. In a normal year, the Courts resolve about six cases for every five felony cases initiated in the system. Overtime, this has meant that total felony caseload numbers have decreased. However, to simply “break even” and resolve the same number of cases as are initiated, the courts need to be resolving cases more than 3-4 times faster than they were between April and June. Instead of continuing business as usual, proceeding case by case in each courtroom, the Circuit Court needs to identify cases with common features that can be quickly and fairly resolved and move them out of the justice system as quickly as possible. Some methods to do this may be:

  • Identifying cases where guilty pleas were ready to be agreed to before the pandemic and settling those cases on a streamlined docket, staffed by a dedicated judge and set of State’s Attorneys;
  • Creating an automatic review system for people incarcerated for more than their potential minimum prison sentence and immediately seeking resolution on those cases;
  • In lower-level cases where a person is not incarcerated, considering sending more felony cases to community diversion programs or dismissing them altogether, to reduce case backlog without creating any public safety risk;
  • Creating robust safety protocols and train judges to be able to safely conduct motions and bench trials without creating a COVID transmission risk;
  • Operating all court calls at full capacity, with an expectation that State’s Attorneys, Public Defenders, and Judges will strive to move cases forward at the same rate in virtual court as they did in in-person court whenever possible; likewise, gathering and tracking data by courtroom and making this case processing data available to the public; and
  • In cases where a jury trial is expected or demanded, rigorously reviewing people’s custody statuses and only continuing the incarceration of defendants if they pose an immediate threat to another person upon release. Cases bound for jury trial with defendants who are in custody should be treated as the highest priority cases for jury trials as soon as it is safe and feasible to hold them.

[1] These data were pulled from the Initiation and Disposition tables of the SAOs Publicly Available Data as of 7/10/20, available at https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/browse?category=Courts. Analysis counted initiations and resolutions of unique CASE_PARTICIPANT_ID numbers in the specified time periods. In effect, this counts the number of people who had cases initiated against them or who had cases resolved during the time periods noted.

[2] These data come from FOIAs sent to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, provided to Appleseed by Injustice Watch. In the 2018 data, the reasons for discharge from custody were not included. 2018 is the most recent year that data from both July and August is available.

[3] Data from Cook County Sheriff’s Website, “Electronic Monitoring Length of Stay”, accessed September 16, 2020.