Investigative reporting doesn’t always make a measurable impact, and reverberations often come long after stories are published. That wasn’t true for Injustice Watch this year.
Our work in 2024 led to a court order granting tenants in eviction court more information about their landlords, prompted a county board hearing into deaths at the Cook County Jail, triggered referrals to state oversight officials for two Cook County judges, and led to more informed participation in judicial elections.
Our small team filed hundreds of public-records requests and used the documents and data we unearthed to shine a light on conditions inside jails, juvenile detention centers, and a home for the state’s most vulnerable foster children. We met the information needs of our community by conducting voter education workshops on the West Side and in the Cook County Jail, creating a pamphlet for parents about what to expect when their children are arrested, and providing families of people who died in the jail with information about their loved ones’ last moments.
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Here’s some of our best work from 2024:
The Tenant Trap
In August, we published The Tenant Trap, a yearlong investigation by senior reporters Alejandra Cancino and Maya Dukmasova, who found thousands of lower-income renters in Chicago are trapped in unsafe buildings and at risk of eviction while their landlords evade accountability. Alejandra and Maya interviewed more than 100 tenants, landlords, judges, attorneys, and other experts and conducted an unprecedented analysis of more than 2.3 million records from the Chicago Department of Buildings and the Cook County Circuit Court. Through the data, they identified 2,654 buildings in the city with chronic serious building code violations and at least 328 buildings where landlords filed eviction cases at the same time the city was taking them to housing court over building conditions, including rat and roach infestations, lack of heat or water, and serious fire code violations.
In the face of these substandard housing conditions, our reporters found families fighting back — by withholding rent, calling city building inspectors, and suing their landlords. Each part of the series followed a different group of tenants using every tool at their disposal to improve their living conditions and hold their landlords accountable. But in each case, the tenants found a legal system set up to protect landlord profits over their right to safe and habitable apartments.
As a direct result of our reporting, Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans issued an order allowing tenants to request information on code violation lawsuits against their landlords, which can help them in defending against an eviction. Tenant advocates have continued to push for funding that would give renters more rights and information about their landlords. In the coming year, we’ll be taking our findings to communities around Chicago to help tenants learn how to research their landlords and better understand their rights in court.
#CheckYourJudges
2024 was a judicial election year, which meant our small team spent months researching more than 150 people running for judge and published comprehensive, nonpartisan voter guides for the March primaries and November general election. Before Injustice Watch began reporting extensively on judicial elections, Cook County voters generally knew very little about judges on their ballots, and more than one-third of voters skipped the judicial races altogether. In November, 75% of Cook County voters made a choice in at least one circuit court race.
During the primary election season, we reported on a controversial Chicago police officer running to become a judge, profiled another candidate who had been a top deputy to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, and highlighted the role of the Illinois Supreme Court and the Cook County Democratic Party in filling judicial vacancies. We also took readers inside the politics of a subcircuit race on the Southwest Side, explored how race and ethnicity were being defined in a race for the state’s top court, followed a candidate trying for the sixth time to become a judge (she lost), and investigated how a law intended to prevent candidates from deceiving voters has worked against female candidates who change their names when they get married or divorced. Then we gave readers the primary results.
In the general election, we looked into the records of the judges running for retention, including one who was under investigation over a dispute with an attorney, and gave readers a window inside the courtrooms of the criminal court judges running for retention. We discovered two judges who had claimed homestead property exemptions on houses they owned in Will County, leading to questions about whether they really lived in Cook County, as required by state law. This reporting led major bar associations to downgrade their ratings of the judges and the chief judge to refer them to the state Judicial Inquiry Board for investigation. One of the judges, Shannon P. O’Malley, lost his seat, becoming the third judge in four elections to be ousted by voters. For nearly three decades, that never happened.
REPORTING with impact
To read our 2024 impact report and learn more about the impact our reporting has had this year, click here.
After the election, senior reporter David Jackson uncovered allegations that Judge E. Kenneth Wright Jr. took advantage of elderly law clients decades ago and acquired their properties, which he then failed to report as required on financial disclosure forms. The revelations raise questions about why issues in Wright’s background drew no widespread attention before he was first elected in 1994 — or in the decades since.
Our judicial election guides are a full-team effort. We take on not only the work of writing and editing the candidate profiles but also the promotion, distribution, and community engagement that helps get our guide into the hands of hundreds of thousands of voters across Cook County. We printed a total of 280,000 copies of our primary and general election guides and distributed them at hundreds of locations, including libraries, coffee shops, food pantries, laundromats, village halls, senior buildings, and other locations. We sent a total of 8,000 guides to the Cook County Jail and conducted seven voter education workshops with incarcerated voters this fall about judicial elections. We also hosted workshops on the West Side, set up tables at farmers markets, hosted a guide distribution party in Humboldt Park, and partnered with dozens of community groups and newsrooms across the county to spread the word about our guide.
Dying on Dart’s Watch
Last year, senior reporter Carlos Ballesteros began looking into a sudden rise in deaths at the Cook County Jail. He learned that 18 people died in the jail in 2023, making it the deadliest year in the jail since at least 1995. Carlos filed more than 70 Freedom of Information Act requests with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, the Cook County medical examiner, and the Illinois State Police, and he obtained thousands of pages of records, which showed lapses in medical care or supervision preceded at least half the deaths. He also learned the sheriff’s office was violating a state law requiring law enforcement agencies to inform families about the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths. In fact, Carlos was the one who told several family members how their loved ones died. We were also the first to report details about the death of Corey Ulmer, who died in June after an altercation with guards in which he was body slammed and injected with sedatives, according to records we obtained.
We printed 400 copies of Carlos’ investigation and sent them to people held at the Cook County Jail, with an invitation to contact us. We received a steady stream of phone calls and letters from people sharing their experiences in the jail. In December, the Cook County Board of Commissioners held a hearing into our findings, where families of those who had died expressed their anger about the jail’s failure to keep their loved ones safe. Several of the families are now suing the jail.
Juvenile justice failures
Senior reporter Dan Hinkel and reporter Kelly Garcia spent more than a year investigating Chicago’s repeated failures to implement programs to divert children from handcuffs and jail cells. Police referred just 286 kids to a $10 million program called Youth Intervention Pathways in its first 11 months, and only 35 completed the program. The investigation found a lack of buy-in from police, little ability to meet the serious needs of families, and reliance on nonprofit service providers with spotty records. We also obtained a decade of Chicago juvenile arrest data and found while arrests were down significantly since 2013, the racial disparities in arrests have persisted, with police arresting more Black and Latinx children in 2023 alone than they did white children in the entire previous decade.
As part of this project, our team identified a lack of information online about what happens when a child is arrested in Cook County. To fill the information gap for people most affected by the court system, Kelly created a step-by-step explainer about the process and possible outcomes after an arrest. Pamphlets featuring the explainer, illustrated by our artist-in-residence Verónica Martinez, were printed in English and Spanish and distributed at juvenile court and to youth-serving community organizations across the city.
Kelly was also the first to report on ambitious plans to close the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and replace it with community-based “centers of care.” The move follows years of critical reports from advocates and outside experts about the conditions inside the JTDC, including extended room confinement, inappropriate strip searches, and a lack of educational and rehabilitative programming. But Kelly’s reporting also found advocates are skeptical about the plans and the lack of transparency from the office of Chief Judge Evans, who oversees the juvenile jail.
Abuse at Aunt Martha’s
Senior reporter David Jackson found officials in the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services had known for years about violence, sexual abuse, and misconduct by guards and residents at Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center, a facility on Chicago’s South Side for the state’s most vulnerable foster children. Aunt Martha’s was shut down in August 2023 after two staff members were accused of sexually abusing children there. But David found allegations of abuse had been raised nearly nine months earlier, and other red flags at the facility dated back nearly to its launch in 2019. Following our reporting, lawmakers published a four-page resolution asking the state auditor general to probe the oversight failures by DCFS.
Freedom of information
The judicial branch isn’t subject to the state’s Freedom of Information Act, which often makes our jobs as reporters covering the court system more difficult. But it didn’t stop our team from obtaining public records from other public agencies and fighting back when they failed to follow the law. Our reporters filed more than 250 FOIA requests in 2024 with more than three dozen agencies, including the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, the Chicago Department of Housing, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and many others.
When agencies failed to provide records — or withheld information we thought they were required by law to release — we took them to court. We filed five FOIA lawsuits this year against the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Cook County President’s Office; all the cases are still pending. We also won a lawsuit we filed last year against the Chicago Police Department, seeking records of U visa certification denials issued by the department. A Cook County judge granted Injustice Watch summary judgment in April, saying CPD had improperly redacted case numbers from the records they had provided us.
We’re already filing more FOIAs and planning our public-service and investigative reporting projects for 2025. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get our reporting on the Cook County court system delivered to your inbox. We’ll be back in January. Have a happy new year!
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