The Cook County courts clerk has called for an independent investigation of some of the numbers being used by Illinois Democrats to tout what they have called the success of Illinois' landmark criminal justice reform law, saying they may be significantly undercounting the number of people charged with crimes who are skipping their court dates.
Cook County Circuit Clerk Iris Martinez issued the call in a letter to Cook County's top elected officials, including County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Chief Judge Tim Evans, on Sept. 17.
In that letter, Martinez asserts as many as three-quarters of all criminal defendants in Cook County - 67,416 criminal defendants out of 90,872 criminal cases - may have failed to appear at otherwise required court hearings in the 12 months since the reform provisions of the so-called Pre-Trial Fairness Act eliminated cash bail in Illinois and rewrote swaths of the laws governing how criminals are arrested, jailed and prosecuted in the state.
Timothy C. Evans, Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County
| Cook County Government
"Cook County leaders must recognize the financial and human impacts that 67,416 failures to appears to court have on case processing, staffing, victims/witness cooperation, and on our law enforcement partners," Martinez wrote. "Together, we need to ensure that victims, witnesses, lawyers, judges, and police officers are not attending tens of thousands of hearings without the defendants being present."
In a response letter, Evans, in turn, cast doubts on Martinez's number, questioning the methodology she used to come up with her estimates of scofflaw behavior among the county's population of accused criminals.
The exchange of letters between Martinez and Evans was first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Martinez's letter arrived as a surprising counter to a stream of statements from Illinois Democratic officials and politicians seeking to take a victory lap on the one-year anniversary of the effective date of the controversial SAFE-T Act and its associated reforms.
That law was enacted in 2022 by Gov. JB Pritzker and his fellow Democrats, as left-wing lawmakers seized on anti-police sentiment stirred up by Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020 to push through sprawling reforms of virtually every aspect of Illinois' criminal justice system.
The Pre-Trial Fairness Act was passed a follow-up revision of the larger so-called SAFE-T Act criminal justice reform law.
While the law was passed in 2022, it did not take full effect until September 2023, after the Democrat-dominated Illinois Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the law from many of Illinois' county state's attorneys, who had argued the state's Democratic governing supermajority violated the state constitution by rewriting the state's criminal justice laws without amending the state constitution first.
The cornerstone of the so-called Pre-Trial Fairness Act was a provision abolishing the state's traditional cash bail system for criminal defendants, which all but entitles criminal defendants to release from custody unless prosecutors can quickly persuade judges they are a threat to public safety or a flight risk who otherwise wouldn't show up for trial.
However, the law also rewrote the rules concerning how courts must treat criminal defendants who don't show up for court hearings.
Previously, if a criminal defendant who was not in custody skipped a court hearing, a judge could issue a warrant for their arrest for failure to appear in court. Police were then authorized to arrest and jail them, if needed, to compel them to come to court.
However, under the Pre-Trial Fairness Act, judges must instead follow more lenient procedures. As outlined in Evans' letter, judges must now issue "notice to appear" postcards to people who don't appear in court when otherwise required. That postcard includes instructions directing the defendant to appear in court at a future time and date.
If defendants again ignore the notice to appear, judges can issue formal summons to the defendants to appear within 48 hours or an arrest warrant. If they appear within 48 hours, the initial failure to appear is wiped away and cannot be used by prosecutors to argue that the defendant is defiant or a flight risk.
To mark the one-year anniversary of the implementation of the law, Democratic politicians crowed about what they called the success of the reforms, asserting both Chicago and Illinois are now fairer and safer because of their reforms.
And they pilloried political opponents, pointing to their own statistics on court appearances and crime data to claim predictions of problems the law may cause to be overblown, at best.
Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, for instance, in an interview with WTTW claimed opposition to the law was "racist."
In a statement posted to X.com, formerly known as Twitter, on Sept. 18, Gov. Pritzker said: "One year ago, Illinois became the first state in the nation to end cash bail. The data shows that failure-to-appear rates, statewide violent and property crime rates, and jail populations have all decreased. Illinois is leading the way to a fairer system."
In her letter, Martinez, however, asserts defenders of the law may be relying on faulty numbers to fuel their victory lap.
Martinez indicates her office counted all people receiving notices to appear - meaning, those who missed at least one court date - among the 67,416 she estimates blew off required court dates.
She further questioned if algorithms being used by the court to determine if a defendant should remain free while awaiting trial accurately reflects their actual "likelihood of being rearrested or to fail to appear to court."
Martinez said a "randomized sample of previous cases with FTA's that receive notices to appear" indicated the "Public Safety Assessment" score generated by the algorithm "does not seem to incorporate these FTA events."
"This poses the critical question of whether we accurately report failures to appear in this assessment and if the PSA is accurately predicting the probability of a defendant's compliance with pretrial release conditions," Martinez wrote.
And Martinez further asserted an independent analysis is needed to determine if Cook County officials have established a faulty window of analysis of crime data overall, to make it appear as if the SAFE-T Act-related reforms have not exacerbated crime.
While the SAFE-T Act supporters have cited analyses to back their success claims, Martinez said the time window they often use - six months before the Pre-Trial Fairness Act took effect and six months after - is too compressed. She noted cash bail had been all but eliminated in Cook County under a general order issued by Evans in September 2017.
She said a better comparison would be to compare present crime rates to those in 2017, before Evans' order, and not to the crime rates ebbing down from their highs in the aftermath of the societal tumult of 2020-2021.
Using data from the Chicago Police Department from 2017 and 2023, Martinez noted violent crimes edged down 1.1%, while property crimes increased 6%. That, however, compared unfavorably to crime rates nationwide, where violent crime decreased 3.6% and property crimes went down 17.3% in that span.
"I encourage the stakeholders of Cook County, along with our legislative partners, to begin a dialogue as to how we can properly analyze the impacts of the (Pre-Trial Fairness Act) and enact the necessary updates to address these and future findings," Martinez wrote.
In his response letter, Evans criticized Martinez's assertions.
He emphasized his office has "requested the complete record level data used for this analysis, as well as an explanation of the methodology used" before he fully responds to the findings.
The judge, though, indicated he believed Martinez's data wrongly relied on notices to appear, rather than only the summons and arrest warrants that may be issued by judges to track defendants' failure to appear rates.
And he asserted he believed Martinez's numbers improperly included multiple notice to appear postcards issued in the same case. He said a preliminary review conducted by his office revealed "fewer than 28,000" of the active or resolved criminal cases in Cook County since Sept. 18, 2023, "had any evidence of a non-appearance, including those cured by a subsequent appearance."
The judge did not indicate in his letter why defendants may have received multiple notice to appear postcards in the same case.
And Evans said a statewide "independent analysis" of the effects of the SAFE-T Act-related reforms is being conducted by researchers at Loyola University Chicago. The work is being funded by the U.S. Justice Department.
He asserted Loyola's "initial analysis validates" weekly figures the Cook County courts have provided to back their success claims.
He noted the researchers are not comparing current data to the period before 2017, as Martinez suggested.
The judge said he was "disappointed" Martinez "misinterpreted trends in crime in Cook County and attributed them to the 2017 General Order and the Pretrial Fairness Act, given that crime and arrests depend on many factors, including policing patterns since 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020."
Martinez will no longer be Cook County Circuit Clerk in 2025. She was defeated in the Democratic primary election earlier this spring by Democratic nominee Mariyana Spyropoulos.
Spyropoulos had received the backing of Preckwinkle and other county and state Democratic Party bosses.
In heavily Democratic Cook County, winning the Democratic nomination is almost always enough to secure election, making the November general election all but a formality.