The former top judge of Cook County’s domestic violence court, Vega will retire with a lifetime pension, despite accusations from women in his courtroom that he mistreated them.
Illinois recently made changes to narrow the scope of the law, which disproportionately impacts young people of color and women. But advocates say the reforms don’t go far enough. And an Injustice Watch analysis shows that at least dozens of people are locked in state prisons on murder charges that likely wouldn’t have been filed if the crime happened today.
We broke down the data on specific charges and asked experts to explain why racial disparities are increasing in Cook County criminal court.
A new round of rental assistance for Cook County tenants facing eviction comes as the statewide eviction moratorium is set to end.
Former prosecutors dominate the roster of 22 new associate judges, who were selected last week by the county’s circuit judges.
The Circuit, our project with the Better Government Association and DataMade, examines Cook County criminal court data from over 3 million cases between 2000 and 2018. Now you can view the charges in our data broken down by race, gender, and ethnicity.
While the state vacated Wayne Washington’s 1996 conviction for Marshall Morgan’s murder, he’s still fighting an uphill battle for an innocence certificate.
Injustice Watch and the Chicago Reader examined the origins of Illinois’s HIV transmission law, how Cook County prosecutors have leveraged it, and its impacts on people charged. The investigation is part of The Circuit, a courts data project from Injustice Watch, the BGA, and DataMade.
A fair and equitable justice system depends on the public defenders whose job it is to represent those people who cannot afford a lawyer. Public defense work is civil rights work. It is the public defender who raises questions about interrogation methods, unlawful police stops, and excessive bail. It is also racial justice work. Nowhere is racial injustice more apparent than in the impact our criminal laws have had on people of color, particularly Black people.
Covid-19 restrictions have led to a growing felony court backlog in Cook County. To clear it, “we have to move faster than normal,” one expert said.