Cook County Public Defender and State’s Attorney Present Program Evaluation Data at Budget Hearing

Cook County Board of Commissioners - Finance Committee
​Departmental Budget Hearing 
October 29, 2019      

​Commissioners Absent:  Tobolski, Arroyo, Gainer

Public Defender Office
Public Defender Amy Campanelli spoke for almost an hour describing her philosophy, goals and results.  This office has 22 divisions with 693 total staff comprised of 5 in Mental Health, 5 in Mitigation, 109 support staff, 58 in management, 59 investigators and 457 attorneys.  Three of these positions are grant-funded; 60% of staff are women and 40% are minorities.  In 2018 this office handled about 10,000 felony cases and 90,000 misdemeanor cases.  

• A McArthur grant, Loyola University, and Appleseed aid are helping with data analysis of programs and methods.
• Campanelli is a big advocate of going to trial rather than plea bargaining.  She said about 50% of defendants at trial are found not guilty.  This holds for both bench trials and jury trials.
• Police Station Representation Unit (PSRU):  This fairly new program provides for 9 on-call attorneys who can be called to represent arrestees at every police station in Cook County 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  The intent is to provide immediate defense for arrestees at the police station, where it was found that 20% of the cases were “dismissed.”  So far in 2019, there have been 767 station visits; the target goal for 2020 is 1350 which is dependent on how many are arrested and on arrestees making the call.  The Public Defender has visited most police stations to put up posters that inform arrestees and ensure that police understand this new requirement.
• Mental Health Unit:  This new program is only getting started with one psychologist hired in September and 5 social workers needing to be hired.  They will work with defendants with mental health issues.  The Mental Health Courts are currently available only for felony cases; Campanelli would like this expanded to misdemeanor cases as well.  She would like to expand to helping those with educational, housing and other needs as well as keeping students in school.

State’s Attorney Office 
Kim Foxx heads this office and gave a brief overview and answered several questions from the commissioners.  This office has hired a new Chief Data Officer to assemble and analyze felony case data on the “dashboard” system.  It is to improve performance since you “can’t fix what you can’t measure” and to  provide transparency.

• The majority of cases this office deals with are related to mental illness or addiction of the defendant.  There is a “revolving door” of these defendants involved with the criminal justice system.  Domestic violence cases are down, which Foxx attributes to illegal immigrants not reporting for fear of being deported.  The most referred crime to the State’s Attorney office is Guns and the associated violence.
• The Gun Crime Strategies Unit concentrates mostly in Chicago and the south suburbs.  It identifies those driving the gun violence.  Since 2017, more attorneys have been moved from misdemeanor prosecution to this felony unit.
• The Felony Review Unit is available 24 hours a day to review cases of those newly arrested for a felony. This must be done before the case can move forward.  
• The Expungement Unit reviews dismissed, overturned, etc. cases for record expungement.  This will increase with the new marijuana law taking effect January 1, 2020.  The office will proactively move to expunge or vacate cases and the records of those affected cases of low level drug possession.  This process used to take 18 months but now is down to 10 months.  Of the 770,000 affected records in Illinois, 72% are in Cook County.  Also because of the new State law, more attorneys have been moved from Narcotics (now zero) to Felony and special prosecution.
• Retail theft:  Many police chiefs are concerned that felony retail theft is prosecuted down to misdemeanors or not prosecuted at all.  Informally, the State’s Attorney has raised the level of prosecution to $1000.  This is not a hard/fast rule.  Local police can still request serial theft or other defendants be prosecuted.  About 50% of retail theft cases are dismissed because the retailer and loss prevention officer do not show in court.  They do not see the value of time and money spent going to court as long as they got the merchandise returned and they can prevent the thief from entering the store again.  A suggestion brought up was to have municipalities issue a retail theft citation similar to a traffic citation and deal with it locally.

Observed by:  Karin Hribar