JUSTICE
Sitting Ducks
As Cook County Jail’s population rises again, advocates fear a spike in COVID-19 cases will follow BY KIRAN MISRA
A
fter significant reductions in the Cook County Jail population, which reached a record low of 4,026 at the height of the pandemic, the number of people in jail is once again on the rise after the protests and arrests of the last few weeks. Currently, 4,524 people are awaiting trial or serving out sentences in the jail, which remains a hotspot for coronavirus transmission in the city. Despite federal court orders to improve sanitation and testing there are still daily reports out of the jail that people currently inside are not being adequately tested for COVID-19 and do not have appropriate access to sanitation and protective equipment, according to Matt McLoughlin, director of programs for the Chicago Community Bond Fund. So far, seven people have died awaiting their trials and hundreds more have tested positive for COVID-19 and are facing life-long health impacts from the virus. “Leaving people in the jail, I would argue, is leaving people to die. As somebody incarcerated in the jail put it, they're basically playing duck, duck, goose with their lives,” said McLoughlin. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, along with county Chief Judge Timothy Evans, publicly committed to reviewing the cases of those currently in Cook County Jail and releasing those who did not pose a public safety threat. However, data analysis from the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice shows that the State’s Attorney’s Office’s actions over the last few months have been at odds with the public commitments to release detainees. “We had been hearing that, despite what Kim Foxx has said publicly about her office cooperating with the decarceration effort, a lot of public defenders and private attorneys were seeing their motions [to release] opposed,” said Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst and staff attorney at the Appleseed Fund who authored a report
PHOTO BY CHARLES EDWARD MILLER
evaluating the State’s Attorney’s Office’s response to the pandemic. Staudt asked the Cook County Public Defender and State’s Attorney’s Office for court watching data from bond hearings held in March, April, and early May, and found that the State’s Attorney’s Office objected to release in the vast majority of cases. Specifically, of the 2,366 motions for bond reduction argued between March 23 and April 22, the State’s Attorney’s Office argued against release in eighty percent of cases. Over the next few weeks, the State’s Attorney’s Office’s objection rate fell slightly,
to between seventy and eighty percent. Though the bond court judge makes the final determination regarding bond and the release of detainees from custody, objections from the State’s Attorney hold significant weight. According to the Appleseed Fund analysis, while judges granted over ninety percent of motions when the State’s Attorney’s Office agreed to release, they granted only fifty-three percent of motions for release when prosecutors objected to it. In an interview with the Weekly, Foxx argued that the methodology for analysis and sourcing for the data presented in the
Appleseed Fund report may overstate the extent of opposition to release from the State’s Attorney’s Office, stating, “The methodology was based on hand counts [of hearings] from the Public Defender. We didn’t have anything to reconcile that [data] with … we weren't counting that in the same way that the Public Defender was counting.” However, the State’s Attorney’s Office has not yet conducted their own analysis of their motions in opposition to release, citing the cost and time required to get the necessary records from the Clerk of the Circuit Court’s office as limiting factors. JUNE 24, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
