CHICAGO – Within hours of taking office as Cook County’s new attorney this month, Eileen O’Neill Burke and her team announced some new ground rules for how prosecutors will handle their most serious cases.
She also vowed to charge all shopliftings over $300 as felonies. State law sets that limit, but her predecessor, Kim Foxx, decided to set the misdemeanor limit at $1,000. So far, our court observers can confirm that prosecutors are following the new policy.
In a news release, O’Neill Burke’s office listed a long list of crimes that will automatically prompt prosecutors in her office to ask a judge to keep the suspect in jail. Among the crimes listed were murder, carjacking, armed robbery, residential burglary, aggravated assault of a child, domestic violence involving a weapon, and any crime in which a suspect is accused of using or possessing a ghost gun, extended magazine or a machine gun. .
When the memo from the retired appeals court circulated online, it generated a lot of backlash from people who believe the new policy would be significantly tougher on criminals than the Foxx administration.
But is that so? We decided to look deeper to see how often prosecutors in Foxx’s administration requested detention for some of the crimes that O’Neill Burke said would automatically result in detention requests effective “immediately.”
We looked up Chicago Police arrest records from the day Illinois abolished cash bail last year and looked up 50 cases for each of the following crimes on O’Neill Burke’s list. How many times did Foxx’s team seek detention for these crimes? How many times have judges granted these requests? This is what we found:
(Notes: For crimes marked with an asterisk, fewer than 50 qualifying cases have been filed since cash bail ended in Illinois. Defendants charged with multiple crimes on this list were only counted in one category. Burke’s list included more crimes, but some , such as possession of a ghost gun, are not identifiable in the city’s arrest records.)
It’s worth noting that we’ve only found four qualifying hate crime cases since the end of cash bail. We did not include serious injuries to a child in the grid because we found only three qualifying cases. Prosecutors requested detention in two cases, but both requests were denied.
As you can see in the chart above, Foxx’s prosecutors generally asked for detention for most major crimes.
In terms of volume, the crimes that will see significantly more detention requests under Burke’s policy are crimes that can be committed under the CTA and possession of machine guns.
And there’s another common complaint that will result in significantly more detention requests under the new administration: O’Neill Burke’s memo promised to require detention for all sex offenses where the “victim was under the age of 13 and the perpetrator was an adult throughout the period.” was’. duration of the offence.”
That sounds like a given for detention, right?
You may be surprised to learn that most of the sexual assault cases filed in the city involve child victims. You may be even more surprised to learn that in our random sample, prosecutors requested detention in only 83% of cases where the victims were under the age of thirteen. And judges granted only 42% of those requests.
Why? Based on our experience observing thousands of bond and detention hearings, these types of cases are typically not random attacks involving strangers. The suspects are often family members. The accusations regularly concern crimes that allegedly took place many years ago. It is not unusual for the suspect to have little or no other criminal background. Judges therefore weigh all this when deciding on detention. They usually choose to send the defendants home, usually with orders to stay away from anyone under the age of 18 and sometimes with an ankle bracelet.
By requesting detention in 100% of serious crimes, O’Neill Burke transfers all responsibility for a suspect’s release to the judge. That’s politically smart. Whether this will lead to judges granting detention requests more often remains to be seen.
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