While far too soon for any certainty, early returns indicate the General Assembly might not spend much of its spring session discussing the statewide rollout of a new pretrial detention system.
Cash bail ended Sept. 19. Most of the worst doomsday predictions from the years leading up to the change are as yet unrealized. As more formal data enters the stream, we can all begin to get a sense for the reality, which is important given the majority of Illinoisans don’t work in or have regular interaction with the criminal justice system.
In October, I wrote about the Kane County Circuit Court dashboard (kanecourt.org/Safe-T-Act), which gets new data every day. That remains a valuable resource, one every judicial circuit should emulate. Then on Dec. 7, we got our first data dump from the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services.
The Illinois Supreme Court created what it calls OSPS in August 2021. It now provides services in more than 70 Illinois counties (many others already had pretrial services) with a combined population reach exceeding 2.73 million. As of Dec. 7, the agency said it had worked on 1,496 petitions for detention. Of those, 976 criminal defendants were ordered detained while 469 were allowed to stay at home while awaiting trial (another 51 petitions are pending).
The OSPS report lacks Kane County’s granular data, such as the nature of underlying criminal charges. As I wrote when focusing on Kane County, criminal justice work is the definition of extenuating circumstances and reducing everything to hard numbers strips away essential nuance and context.
But from a macro standpoint this type of information can only help as professionals fine tune their approaches to our new reality. That includes lawmakers, many of whom surely have made time during their weeks away from Springfield to check in with prosecutors, sheriffs and others in their districts who might offer detailed feedback.
Some of those conversations might include explanations. One seemingly is in order for Livingston County Judge Jennifer Bauknecht, who denied a criminal suspect pretrial release but, in so doing, focused almost exclusively on personal objections to cash bail elimination. On Dec. 8, an appellate court vacated her judgement as an abuse of judicial discretion and ordered her to conduct a new hearing.
Bauknecht acknowledged she would’ve released the suspect under the cash bail system, but also said cashless pretrial release isn’t “appropriate because the defendant does pose a significant danger to the community, specifically all children under the age of 18.”
The defendant is either dangerous or he’s not, regardless of ability to pay. Judges could detain every eligible suspect, but data show they aren’t. As cooler heads prevail statewide, Illinois continues moving toward a functional, fair system.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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