A year after the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) under Eileen O’Neill Burke directed prosecutors to stop the practice of sending low-level, nonviolent gun possession cases to Cook County’s Restorative Justice Community Courts, or RJCC, O’Neill Burke reversed the policy and resumed referring certain gun-possession cases to the RJCC.
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Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has instructed her office to resume sending some people with gun possession charges to the county’s Restorative Justice Community Courts (RJCC), which reroute young people with nonviolent charges from criminal courts to an alternative program. Upon completion, the charge is dismissed.
Block Club Chicago reporter Maxwell Evans wrote about our work to take take traditional criminal legal defense out of the courthouse and into the community to provide more collaborative representation and services. We will be launching our first community defense center, the Freedom Defense Center of Roseland, in 2024. Full story and link to the article in Block Club are below.
The Cook County Public Defender's Office is featured in a short film about violence interruption.
In this podcast, Public Defender Mitchell speaks about racially targeted enforcement of gun possession statutes. In Cook County, racially disproportionate enforcement of gun rules sends thousands of Black people to prison because they do not have or cannot get the required licenses, not because they've been accused of harming someone.
Dozens of children have been unjustly held in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center even though judges ordered them released. That is because the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services says it has nowhere to send them. Andrea Lubelfeld, Chief of our Juvenile Division, spoke out about the problem in a story for WBEZ.
A power struggle has been brewing in Cook County, where job offers to several attorneys from Public Defender Sharone Mitchell were rescinded after confusion over the county's drug policy. Recreational marijuana became legal in Illinois last January. That complicated the hiring process for many, including a handful of attorneys offered jobs months ago by the Cook County Public Defender's Office. Their offers were revoked when drug tests came back positive for marijuana.
The Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California is reopening post-pandemic. COVID-19 brought seismic changes to the Cook County court system. And after more than a year, a reopening reckoning is close at hand.
A better-funded public defender’s office could be a leader in the fight for equity and justice, Sharone Mitchell said. Public defenders “put a mirror to the system and say that this isn’t working for us."
WGN Radio’s Karen Conti is with Cook County Public Defender Amy Campanelli to talk about the criminal justice reform bill signed by Governor Pritzker this week, eliminating cash bail. Amy also shares the many services offered by the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender.