CHICAGO, IL, Dec. 28, 2022 – There are few practices in the criminal legal system more abhorrent than using access to wealth to determine whether someone is jailed while awaiting trial.
The use of money bond has always been an affront to several basic Constitutional principles, making a mockery of the presumption of innocence and reducing critical decisions to mere guesswork about what may or may not be in someone’s pocketbook.
Today, Illinois lawmakers passed technical amendments to the state’s SAFE-T Act, a historic reform that takes the next step in creating a more fair and equitable criminal legal system. The SAFE-T Act, which includes the Pretrial Fairness Act, puts our state in the national vanguard on one of the most important issues of our day – ending wealth-based pretrial jailing that weakens communities and is fundamentally unfair. On Jan. 1, 2023, Illinois will become the...
The Cook County Public Defender’s Office announced the swearing in of 25 new attorneys who are now Assistant Public Defenders in our office. This group of attorneys joins our professional family and our mission to protect the fundamental rights, liberties and dignity of each person whose case has been entrusted to us by providing the finest legal representation.
The Office of the Cook County Public Defender was represented at the MacArthur Foundation biannual Safety and Justice Challenge Network meeting by Public Defender Sharone Mitchell, Director of Community Engagement Alexandria Santistevan and Director of Legislative and External Affairs Sav Felix.
In a historic step toward ending the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD’s) decades-long practice of holding people in incommunicado detention – without access to lawyers or family members – the Cook County Public Defender’s Office, along with a broad coalition of community groups, activists and legal aid groups, entered a Consent Decree with the City of Chicago, overseen by Judge Neil Cohen of the Circuit Court of Cook County.
The Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) is the part of the larger SAFE-T Act that was signed into law in February 2021. The law makes reforms to Illinois' criminal justice system centered on increasing Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity.
The Cook County Public Defender’s Arrest Hotline – 844-817-4448 – operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, taking calls and providing vital legal representation for people being detained by law enforcement anywhere in Chicago and Cook County.
Do you need help getting back your suspended or revoked driver's license? The Cook County Public Defender's Office is proud to co-host the seventh installment of the Driver's License Reinstatement Expo. The expo is September 17 at Malcolm X College and volunteer attorneys from our office will participate.
Assistant Public Defenders Margaret Armalas and Megan Tomlinson discuss the shocking pattern of racist enforcement of gun possession laws in Chicago in an op-ed published in the Chicago Tribune.
Mitchell is the public defender for Cook County, which includes Chicago, a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Growing up on the South Side, Mitchell was raised to believe that guns are dangerous and harmful, a view that was reinforced by his experiences as a public defender and gun control advocate. But those experiences have also led him to believe that gun-permitting laws are harmful, as he explains to Lulu Garcia-Navarro in this episode of the New York Times First Person podcast.
