Delays in the Cook County courts – Chicago Tribune

Another hearing. Another delay.

This is what passes for progress in the Cook County criminal courts, a system that a Tribune investigation found is failing at its most essential function: ensuring fair and timely justice.

In an unprecedented review of murder cases, the Tribune found Cook County’s courts are taking longer than ever to separate the guilty from the innocent — longer than courthouses in any city for which comparable data was available, including New York and Los Angeles. Delays here were growing before the pandemic, and have been getting worse since.

Advocates nationally aim for murder cases to take no more than a year. Cook County’s goal is a little more than two years. But it’s now taking more than four to complete most of the county’s murder cases, with some lasting up to a decade or more.

“I think what you’re discovering is a crisis,” said Tom Geraghty, a Northwestern University professor emeritus who’s worked in and studied the county’s courts for decades. “I mean four years to wait for a trial is ridiculous. Two years is ridiculous.”

Experts and advocates agree that justice shouldn’t be rushed, but in Cook County the pace of prosecution for murder cases has slowed to a near standstill.

Murder defendants typically linger in jail longer than a presidential term. For those wrongfully accused, the process costs years with their families on the outside. Taxpayers are left to foot the bill for tens of millions a year in extra jail housing costs.

And victims’ families must wait years for justice.

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To identify the underlying reasons for the courts’ slow pace, the Tribune conducted an in-depth review of more than two dozen randomly selected pending murder cases that had lasted four years or longer. Reporters pored over thousands of documents, observed dozens of hearings in those cases, and spoke with defendants, victims’ family members and attorneys.

What emerged was a series of breakdowns so common they barely register with courthouse insiders. They are baked into the culture, accepted by most as part of doing business in a calcified system.

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It is a long-standing reality in Cook County criminal courts: Each courtroom is its own little kingdom, controlled by a judge with license to run their docket however they please. Every day, every judge gets to choose how aggressively to push for progress in a deeply dysfunctional system.

They can stay hands-off and work at an excruciatingly slow pace. At the other extreme, they can berate attorneys for every perceived misstep in an attempt to keep cases from dragging.

“Many people talk about there being one criminal justice system (in Cook County),” Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr.cq once told county officials. “Actually, there are probably hundreds of criminal justice systems.”

To see how these differences play out in court, the Tribune observed multiple hearings in two courtrooms on opposite ends of the spectrum.

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To document the problem, reporters obtained and analyzed data from several sources. They also interviewed courthouse attorneys, defendants, victims’ families and their advocates, while filing three dozen record requests, poring over more than 40 case files and attending more than 1,000 hearings.

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For 50 years, study after study has documented serious problems. Yet judges show little alarm and won’t discuss the issues in a system that, by design, limits transparency and accountability.

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