Latest News - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

Help Stop the “Draconian Clampdown” on Mail, Books, and Paper Products in Cook County Jail

Last year, when he was unable to "keep the people in his custody safe," Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart implemented punitive measures like prohibiting visitors to Cook County Jail from bringing in paper, attributing overdose deaths to paper soaked with narcotics and poisons. There were 17 deaths in 202...

“Haste Makes Waste” in Courtrooms Too: Balancing Quality with Quantity in Response to the Immigration Backlog

Since 2017, the backlog of pending immigration cases in the United States has been growing exponentially. Today, there are over two million pending cases in the U.S. immigration court system. Over the past few months, the situation has significantly worsened, with a record-breaking number of new dep...

Judicial Discretion in Cook County’s Problem-Solving Courts

Cook County’s problem-solving courts (PSCs) are specialized diversion courts that work with accused people whose mental health conditions and/or substance usage may have contributed to their arrests. The PSCs include Drug Treatment Courts, Veterans Treatment Courts, and Mental Health Courts; in othe...

Supervised Visitation & Safe Exchange Programs: Cook County Centers Provide a “Safe Place” for Families to Connect

When a parent’s fitness is called into question by the court, particularly when there are concerns about intimate partner abuse or other forms of harmful behavior, courts may rely on communities’ supervised visitation programs to ensure that children have the opportunity to maintain contact with the...

Pretextual Vehicle Stops—A Pipeline to Police Testilying

Our January 2023 police perjury report convincingly demonstrates that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has a culture that condones dishonesty, prevalent lying in court (“testilying”) and, false report-writing by police officers. Along with recommendations to improve transparency (some of which ha...