Latest News - Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts

Pro Bono Week

Last Wednesday was the second annual Conference on Access to Justice presented by the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Access to Justice. This year’s topic was “Pro Bono: Closing the Justice Gap in Illinois Courts”. In a speech filled with deeply moving anecdotes, Keynote speaker, Bryan Stevens...

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,...