In a September 17, 2024 letter to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, outgoing Circuit Clerk Iris Martinez threw a factless grenade at the Pretrial Fairness Act, attempting to discredit it with deeply flawed and misleading data. Many of these false claims were repeated again today in an opinion piece published by the Chicago Tribune. Martinez, who leads an office accused of serious errors and violations of state law, alleges that three-quarters of people with criminal cases are missing court in Cook County since the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect.

No one should take such outlandish claims seriously. Rigorous, transparent research conducted by professors at Loyola University and funded by the United States Department of Justice shows just how ridiculous her claims are: “Analysis of court data from 22 counties indicates that overall [failure to appear] warrant rates … actually declined slightly, from 13.6% before the Pretrial Fairness Act to 12.5% after.” And as a Chicago Sun-Times article about the Circuit Clerk’s original letter summarized: “Researchers, judges, prosecutors, public defenders and domestic violence advocates were baffled and said Martinez’s findings did not line up with what they’re seeing every day in court.”

Martinez’s misleading claims are many, but there are a few that stand out:

• First, because the Circuit Clerk refuses to provide data to either reporters or other court stakeholders, it is unclear what universe of cases she is considering or what she is labeling as a “failure to appear.” As the Chief Judge’s initial letter in response points out, the circuit clerk “did not provide clear parameters,” making it nearly impossible to understand—much less dispute—her claims. 
• For example, Martinez points to 31,393 felony cases that have open warrants, but the vast majority of these warrants predate the Pretrial Fairness Act and were issued under the money bond system. This is not an analysis of behavior under the Pretrial Fairness Act but instead an attempt to wrongly assign blame for tens of thousands of warrants issued under the money bond system to the Pretrial Fairness Act by obscuring when those warrants were issued.
• The Circuit Clerk also claims “defendants missed court 67,416 times” in “the first 50 weeks” after the law changed, but she does not indicate any source for these numbers, define what she considered to be “missing court,” or clarify how many of these cases were already pending when the law changed and thus were initiated under the money bond system. In contrast, the Cook County Circuit Court’s September 28, 2024 Pretrial Fairness Act Weekly Dashboard (encompassing three additional weeks of data) indicates only 65,298 criminal cases have been filed since the law went into effect. The transparently absurd claim that more court dates have been missed than cases have been filed raises serious concerns that Martinez’s numbers have fundamental and incurable flaws.
• In Martinez’s original letter, she claimed that “cash bond” had been “essentially eliminated” in Cook County by 2017 reforms. Academic evaluations of bond outcomes, however, found that 43% of people charged with felonies were still being ordered to pay money bonds as of April 2018. While the op-ed backs off of this demonstrably false claim, instead saying that “issuing alternatives to cash bail was already standard practice,” such glaring errors call into question all of Martinez’s analyses.
• Finally, Martinez points out that domestic violence charges make up 14% of all charged cases in Cook County. That is true—as it has been for years. But the number of charged cases says nothing about what has happened following pretrial reform. It seems Martinez simply included that statistic to frighten people and trick them into thinking pretrial reform has somehow caused domestic violence, despite the active and ongoing support of advocates against domestic violence for the law.

There is a simple reason Martinez’s claims appeared as an opinion piece and not a reported article: the Circuit Clerk has been unable or unwilling to provide data to support them. We do not dispute such high rates of missed court dates would be newsworthy—if they were true.

We believe in examining the impact of the Pretrial Fairness Act and using data to evaluate implementation. That’s why we advocated for mandatory, statewide data collection and public reporting in the Act and are still working to implement those provisions of the law. Until we have comprehensive statewide data, we can rely on the initial data emerging from Loyola University, individual county court systems, and the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services. 

At a time when public perception of community safety is increasingly disconnected from actual instances of violence and other crime (which are declining), it is disappointing to see the outgoing circuit clerk abuse her position of trust to fearmonger, lie, and mislead the public. Cook County and all of Illinois deserve better.