At Issue: Bond Reform in Chicago Has the County, Advocates in Agreement
With efforts to speed trials and reduce the jail population falling short — and a lawsuit charging that unaffordable bond levels in Cook County are unconstitutional — Sheriff Tom Dart has called for eliminating the cash-bond system.
Instead of “tinkering…around the edges,” said Cara Smith, policy director for the sheriff’s office, “we’ve got to blow the system up and replace it with a system that is not dependent on wealth.”
Cook County is notorious for pretrial jail stays that can last months, even years. The county pays millions of dollars a year in lawsuits that charge inhumane conditions in its overcrowded jail; more than 200 federal lawsuits are currently pending, according to Injustice Watch.
Dart’s call came a day before the Cook County Board held a hearing on bail reform. District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Truman Morrison described Washington D.C.’s experience abolishing cash bail and said that not a single judge there “would ever dream of returning to the dark, dysfunctional days of deciding personal freedom by dollar bills.”
In Washington D.C. and Kentucky, cash bail has been replaced by a risk assessment model in which only defendants who are judged to be at risk of fleeing or committing a another crime are held for trial. On Kentucky, only 43 percent of jail inmates are awaiting trial, far below the national average of 60 percent. In Cook County, 95 percent of jail inmates are awaiting trial or sentencing.
A new risk-assessment program for Cook County judges is intended to reduce reliance on bail, “but as long as we have cash bond, the risk assessment is not being looked at,” said Cook County Public Defender Amy Campanelli.
Cook County Judges ignored the risk assessment program’s recommendations in 85 percent of cases, according to a study released this summer by Dart’s office.
For a live-tweet account of the November 17 Cook County Board of Commissioners Criminal Justice Committee hearing on monetary bond, see this Storify from a City Bureau Documenter who attended the event.
Electronic monitoring
In a series of articles on the topic, Injustice Watch reports that the number of suspects who commit new crimes or fail to show for trial does not rise when court systems move from cash bail to risk assessment models; suspects of nonviolent crimes who cannot make bail are more than four times as likely to be convicted in Cook County, at least in part because long detentions increase pressure to plead guilty to crimes they haven’t committed; and while Cook County officials say funding for pretrial services is inadequate, other counties report that they’ve covered increased pretrial services and saved millions of dollars when they’ve reduced jail populations.
And as Cook County increasingly turns to electronic monitoring to replace pretrial detention, Injustice Watch reports that reform advocates “caution that judges are overusing electronic monitoring” for persons who pose no threat to the public or danger of fleeing.
“Electronic monitoring is still pretrial detention — restricting the liberty of people who haven’t been convicted of anything,” said Sharlyn Grace, a policy fellow at the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. “Electronic monitoring is just a way the criminal justice system has expanded. It is another form of pretrial punishment.”
“In Washington, D.C., judges strive to limit the use of electronic monitoring even as the court system has moved away from requiring cash bail for release,” according to Injustice Watch.
No-show cops
The Chicago Reader and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute identify an array of factors behind long pretrial detentions in Cook County. One major issue: no-show cops.
The Reader focuses on Jermaine Robinson, a 21-year-old with past run-ins with the law who was attending college and working. Robinson couldn’t post a $7,500 bond after he was arrested when a gun was found in a house he was visiting. He faced continuance after continuance, each causing a delay of months, while arresting officer Anthony Bruno failed to respond to summonses to testify.
When Bruno did finally testify, the judge granted Robinson’s motion to quash his arrest and the state dropped all charges against Robinson — after he spent four years in jail.
In 2005 a U.S. Justice Department study found the Cook County court system suffered from “a legal culture that facilitates unnecessary delay in case processing,” according to the Reader. The study found a major factor was the continual failure of police officers to show up in court. Police absenteeism “does not appear to generate any sanctioning,” the report said.
Asked by the Reader about investigations and consequences for officers who violate departmental policy which prohibits officers from failing to report when called to court, a Chicago Police Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Reform initiatives
In August, U.S. Justice Department attorneys argued that the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution forbids “punishing people for their poverty” — or “practices that incarcerate indigent individuals before trial solely because of their inability to pay” — as they intervened in a court challenge to Georgia’s bail system by Equal Justice Under the Law. That group that has also challenged the money bail system in cities across the South.
The Chicago Community Bond Fund “restores the presumption of innocence before trial” by assisting people who are in jail because they can’t afford bail. In its first year the group’s revolving fund provided $262,000 to post bail for 45 people from Cook County Jail. “Bail is essentially unfair and unjust,” according to CCBF, and the reliance on money bail “undermines the very idea that safety should govern release and detention decisions.”
Former mayoral candidate Willie Wilson has bailed out 110 Cook County Jail inmates since September at a cost of $30,000. He had his beneficiaries to Thanksgiving lunch last week, where they received counseling from pastors and $200 from Wilson to “help them get on their way,” the Tribune reports.
Bail is “a moral issue,” according to Wilson. “It’s discrimination between the rich and poor.”
Other news
Hundreds protested on the Magnificent Mile on the day after Thanksgiving, denouncing the new police accountability agency established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and demanding an elected body to govern the police department.
A year after video of Laquan McDonald’s shooting death was released, there’s “a lot of reform in the air but not much on the ground yet,” comments Andy Shaw of the Better Government Association. He gives highlights of a forum on “Laquan’s Legacy” earlier this month.
At the forum, Police Board president Lori Lightfoot made headlines by suggesting that the U.S. Attorney has closed its investigation into McDonald’s shooting and the coverup which followed.
In a retrospective in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago police officers complain of a “hostile climate” since the video release affecting their morale and performance — with the loss of “proactive policing” driving up violence rates. But civil rights attorney Craig Futterman points out that other cities have not seen surges of violence when they required street stops to be based on the constitutional standard of reasonable suspicion.
Supt. Eddie Johnson relieved a sergeant of his police powers following the shooting of 19-year-old Kajuan Raye on Nov. 23. Raye was fleeing after the officer stopped him as he waited for a bus. The sergeant said Raye turned and pointed a gun at him, but no weapon has been recovered. An autopsy showed Raye was shot in the back, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. At a press conference on November 29, Johnson urged residents to comment on the CPD’s new use of force guidelines draft (the deadline for which has been extended to December 5). See City Bureau and the Invisible Institute’s Use of Force Tracker for a breakdown of what’s contained in the guidelines and how it differs from the past.
A grand jury has been impaneled to hear evidence about a police cover-up of the shooting of Laquan McDonald. Special prosecutor Patricia Brown said subpoenas will be issued in coming weeks. Supt. Eddie Johnson has recommended firing seven officers for allegedly giving false accounts of the shooting. No word on investigations of the role of top brass who backed up those accounts, despite video evidence showing them to be false.
More than 120 investigators and legal staff for the new Civilian Office of Police Accountability must take four to six weeks of training and tests to qualify for their jobs. The city has hired Thomas Kim, chief investigator for New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, as deputy chief administrator of COPA.
Lawyers for the Englewood Four, cleared of rape and murder in 2011 after 16 years in prison, say they’ve found an FBI report quoting a former Cook County prosecutor admitting the four were coerced into making false confessions by Chicago police.
In a federal civil rights investigation following the discovery of DNA evidence that exonerated the men, Terrence Johnson of the State’s Attorney’s office said he and Fabio Valentini, now one of outgoing State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s top deputies, knew that detectives “conspired to lie in court” to cover up misconduct, and that the two prosecutors kept quiet about it.
The Tribune recaps the story of Chicago homicide Detective Frank Laverty, who prevented a false murder conviction by revealing the existence of CPD’s “street files” — and paid for violating the code of silence.
