Corniki Bornds’ child was shot in the head six years ago. Early on, her grief was so jarring that she would freeze up at every court hearing. Now, 70-plus hearings into the case, each appearance feels like “pouring salt in an open wound.”
Sitting in a holding cell at Leighton Criminal Court Building, Michael Laster waits for the 83rd court appearance in his case, held in October 2022. Laster opted to cut a plea deal at his 86th appearance. Every month or two, a mourning mother and the man accused of killing her son journey to a Cook County courtroom for another seemingly pointless hearing.
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.
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.To document the problem, reporters 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.
22 years by continuing to win an internal vote taken among the very judges he’s supposed to be supervising.that did not respond directly to many of the Tribune’s questions. In that statement, his office downplayed the Tribune’s findings, saying murders make up just 1% of all felonies and overall court performance has been improving since the worst of the pandemic slowdowns.
In an interview, the second in command in State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office acknowledged delays but said prosecutors are often waiting to get and share records from law enforcement, then waiting for the court to work through defense requests to limit what evidence could get in front of a jury., Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr.
“But,” he said, taking a breath, “when you’re in here and you’re stuck, you have no choice. You have no choice but to go with the flow.” Another way to look at it: The court wants murder cases completed within two years of an early-stage hearing called an arraignment. That goal was met in a fifth of murder cases completed systemwide in 2019. In 2022, just a tenth met that goal.
Perhaps the most striking comparison comes from data collected in the years before the pandemic by the National Center for State Courts. The respected national group — one often cited by Cook County’s chief judge — studied data from courthouses across the country. One calculation was how often homicide cases were completed in a year or less — considered a gold standard in effective case management.
But the national study shot down one argument that court officials have made in the past: that bigger court systems like Cook County invariably are slower than smaller ones.In the past decade, New York officials — including the state’s top judge — publicly pushed plans to tackle their case backlogs. That judge, Jonathan Lippman, told the Tribune “there’s no excuse” for delays to have ballooned in Chicago in ways that let defendants fester in jail for four, five or more years without a trial..
Other holdups include waits for mental health exams, delays in the cases of co-defendants and other side issues. Attorneys’ heavy caseloads leave little wiggle room on scheduling, so backups in one case can cause slowdowns in others. Chief Judge Evans’ office did not respond to questions about these omissions. Lawyers, if they knew of the law, brushed it off to reporters as unnecessary or impractical to enforce.
The seven-story building has an air of a grand edifice gone slightly shabby — wide, tall hallways with carved stone walls where you might encounter a dead roach, belly-up. Most hearings are officially scheduled for 9 a.m. But judges may not filter in until 10 or later. Their docket may be full — with a dozen or more cases to be called in no particular order — but they frequently take breaks as they wait for the right mix of attorneys and defendants to be present. Judges often walk into back offices, leaving attorneys to make small talk or work on their laptops. Spectators, sitting on hard wooden benches, are not told when court will resume.
Most judges, themselves former prosecutors and defense attorneys, usually accept the lawyers’ statements at face value. Opposing attorneys rarely question them either, instead agreeing to push the case back again. By then, he was waiting for his second trial. The first one, which concluded more than four years after his arrest, was later nullified because of an error — the judge forgot to swear in the jury.appearance came one Monday in October. Around 7 a.m. he began his handcuffed journey to the courtroom from the massive jail complex, a half-mile walk that snaked through underground tunnels.
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