Editorial: Eileen O'Neill Burke puts judges on the spot to keep Cook County residents safe

Yahoo

09-04-2025

When state lawmakers made Illinois the first state in the nation to end cash bail, they ramped up the pressure considerably on judges to protect the public from violent offenders when they're charged with crimes.
The SAFE-T Act made it judges' sole responsibility to decide whether an accused criminal should be imprisoned while awaiting their day in court. And if not? What was the recourse for judges who weren't prepared to allow someone so accused to roam free without conditions?
Home confinement, monitored electronically by the county, was the answer. Since the landmark law's passage several years ago, Cook County Circuit Court judges have resorted increasingly to electronic monitoring to ensure defendants appear in court when they're called and commit no crimes in the meantime. At last count, there were about 3,600 people on electronic monitoring in Cook County, nearly double the 2,000 in 2018.
Now Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke, who took office in December promising a tougher prosecutorial approach, is raising alarms about the county's reliance on and changing administration of electronic monitoring. On Monday, she ordered prosecutors in her office to object formally whenever a judge denies their request to keep a defendant confined while awaiting trial.
Just since December, she told her staff in a written memo outlining the new policy, the state's attorney's office has approved 57 cases alleging removal of ankle bracelets, absconding from confinement locations or deliberately failing to recharge devices so that remote monitoring is impossible. Those wearing ankle bracelets, she wrote, include 'offenders charged with murder, attempted murder, predatory criminal sexual assault, as well as numerous other violent offenses such as aggravated battery, felony domestic battery, various other sexual assault and abuse charges.'
Since bringing a stricter enforcement ethos to the county's prosecutorial office, O'Neill Burke has expressed alarm more than once at the fact that the office of Chief Cook County Judge Tim Evans is taking complete control of the electronic monitoring system. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's office has run its own such program for more than 35 years but is phasing it out now. Beginning April 1, the sheriff refused to take on new defendants on electronic monitoring.
Officials with Evans' office have told Cook County commissioners they will need to hire dozens more people to run the entire program (Evans has administered his own electronic monitoring system for 14 years). That process will take months if not longer.
In the meantime, O'Neill Burke believes the Office of the Chief Judge's insufficient resources and lack of its own armed police force to respond directly to electronic monitoring violations represent 'a serious threat to public safety.'
We agree. Our worries are heightened by the reasoning Dart gave last year for ending the version of the program his office was running. 'We can't do it safely,' he said.
When it was initially devised, electronic monitoring was intended to alleviate overcrowding at Cook County Jail and was available primarily for nonviolent offenders. No longer. As of last December, more than 100 of the 1,500 people in Dart's supervision were awaiting trial on murder or attempted murder charges.
Dart said in effect that if judges were refusing to hold accused murderers and expecting his office to ensure those individuals posed no threat to the public, they ought to run the whole system.
'When it's more closely, completely connected to the judiciary, there's probably going to be a lot more thought given (to) who is put out there,' he told WGN News.
Given Evans' vocal support over many years for the rights of the accused and criminal justice reform measures like the SAFE-T Act, we're not confident his judges will respond that way. But we do believe at a minimum that the transfer of electronic monitoring administration to Evans' office will heighten the scrutiny on judges' decisions when prosecutors ask to incarcerate someone accused of a violent crime.
In a Monday court appearance, officers with the Cook County Circuit Court's Pretrial Division bewilderingly concluded a man charged with five sexual assaults or attempted assaults over the past three years in Logan Square was a low risk for committing more crimes or for failure to appear in court, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Thankfully, Cook County Circuit Judge Susana Ortiz nonetheless ordered 36-year-old Chakib Mansour Khodja held, calling him a 'clear and present danger to each of these victims and to all females.' At the hearing, Khodja pleaded not guilty to the rape spree, which terrified the neighborhood for months.
O'Neill Burke is right to raise public awareness of these troubling changes to the pretrial process and to put more pressure on judges to ensure public safety is made a priority when they decide who should be allowed to walk the streets. Tim Evans' approach to public safety and the rights of the accused is in the spotlight here. One might even go so far as to say it's on trial.
He and the judges who serve under him surely must know there will be far more scrutiny on the decisions they make at the pretrial level, especially with a state's attorney's office that has a policy now of seeking incarceration without exception for those charged with possessing firearms equipped with devices converting them to automatic weapons. As of March 14, judges had agreed to pretrial confinement in 115, or just 58%, of the 202 such cases in which O'Neill Burke's prosecutors had asked for detention.
Under Chief Judge Evans' watch, can electronic monitoring of those accused of violent acts or possessing weapons of war keep the public safe? That's what O'Neill Burke — to her credit — is forcing Cook County to confront.
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