South Side Weekly Staff

This photo captures the moment when crowds outside the Cook County Courthouse on California and 26th Street learned of Jason Van Dyke’s conviction in October 2018. A little over three years later, Van Dyke is free after serving half his sentence. Cook County, only twenty-two percent had the charge filed at the beginning. Koehler said she’s never personally handled a case with it as a starting charge in all her years as a defense attorney.

The office of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx did not respond to a request for comment.

Aisha Cornelius Edwards, executive director of Cabrini Green Legal Aid, was a Cook County prosecutor between 2005 and 2013, when the office was led by Dick Devine and, later, Anita Alvarez. When initiating cases, “we were encouraged [by supervisors] to go for the highest possible charge we could get,” she said.

“Back then, the idea was that everybody’s guilty anyway: The higher the charge, the higher the bond you’re gonna get,” Edwards said. “This made it more likely the person would stay in custody, which means you were more likely to get a plea quicker.”

Most commonly, Koehler and Edwards said, second-degree murder convictions result from plea deals or the way that Van Dyke’s did—with juries or judges deciding that the evidence supports only a second-degree murder conviction.

Edwards agreed that eighty-one months is an unusual prison term for this crime. But she argued that the real problem is that the typical defendant’s sentence is so long—not that Van Dyke’s was so short. She observed that everyone involved in the case gave it a lot of care and attention, and that Gaughan saw Van Dyke “as a human being who made a mistake.” “But the vast majority of folks in the system, especially those that are poor, Black and brown don’t have that— where someone takes the time to look at them as a human being,” Edwards said. “So I’m not advocating for harsher sentences but for the same in-depth level of humanization to go into every single case.” ¬

This story is part of The Circuit, a datadriven collaboration to investigate and reveal how Cook County’s courts work. It was originally published online at Injustice Watch on March 17, 2022. Reprinted with permission.

Maya Dukmasova is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch covering judges and the courts.