We are deeply disturbed by Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s new policy requiring her attorneys to object when a judge denies a request for detention and instead orders someone to electronic monitoring. In her new directive, Burke makes several misleading and problematic claims. We expect better from someone who ran on a commitment to the Pretrial Fairness Act.

State’s Attorney Burke falsely suggests that the Chief Judge’s Pretrial Services Division cannot appropriately supervise people alleged to have violated the terms of their electronic monitoring. For decades, the Chief Judge has operated an electronic monitoring program without this ever being an issue. The Cook County’s Sheriff-run electronic monitoring program was extremely unusual; across the entire state of Illinois, all pretrial electronic monitoring programs are run by Pretrial Services under the judiciary and not by law enforcement. The State’s Attorney’s claim that without the Sheriff’s involvement, dangerous people will run free is contrary to years of evidence and such statements are merely designed to scare people as they have no basis in fact.

The composition of the Chief Judge’s Pretrial Services electronic monitoring program has not suddenly changed and has never been limited to low-level cases. As of March 15th, the Office of Chief Judge (OCJ) was monitoring more than 2,000 people on its electronic monitoring home confinement and domestic violence exclusion zone programs. This is compared to the approximately 1,500 people electronically monitored by the Sheriff’s Office on the same day. The OCJ has long successfully supervised people accused of high-level offenses, and there is no reason to believe that will change.

Although the State’s Attorney has changed recently in Cook County, the presumption of innocence has not. No one under pretrial supervision has been found guilty, and in fact, the State’s Attorney’s Office will inevitably dismiss some of these cases and juries will acquit some of these people at trial. We should be careful how we describe people who have not been found guilty of a crime. 

This blanket policy ignores the fact that studies have shown that people on electronic monitoring have the same extremely low rates of rearrest as people who are released awaiting trial without monitors. Additionally, a study conducted at the request of the Cook County Board of Commissioners found that electronic monitoring had “no substantial effect on failure to appear rates and rearrest rates, or on rearrest rates for violent crimes.” The vast majority of people on electronic monitoring appear at all of their court dates, and less than 1% are rearrested for allegations of violence. 
Ignoring the available data and issuing blanket policies that ignore the facts of individual cases will make our communities less safe and our justice system less fair. Quite simply, this policy is designed to bully judges into following prosecutors’ opposition to pretrial release, even when the prosecution fails to meet their burden of proof for detention.