Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx used a conference on criminal justice Wednesday to defend her support of a new state law that will end cash bail for nonviolent offenses in 2023 and said more education is needed to show how the inability to make bond has unfairly kept nonviolent people jailed.

       Appearing in a video forum hosted by the Illinois Justice Project, Foxx delivered broad-based criticism of the public, law enforcement, some prosecutors and even judges for failing to understand that pretrial is not “pre-punishment” or that “the presumption of innocence maintains with the accused until there’s a finding of guilt.”

       The new law was one of the pillars of the legislative agenda of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus and was signed by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker in February. It made Illinois one of the first states in the nation to do away with cash bail but doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1, 2023, in order to allow court systems to adjust to the changes.

       Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx on Dec. 7, 2020. (Youngrae Kim/Chicago Tribune)

       Opponents have often focused on the law’s potential to increase gun violence, an idea Foxx sought to debunk.

       “The whole narrative around bail reform driving gun violence, it’s not unique here to Chicago, we’ve seen it across the country. And there’s been just this real intellectually dishonest conversation about it. But there hasn’t been a forceful pushback,” Foxx said.

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       “There has to be an aggressive pushback, and I say this as an elected leader who has found herself the subject of a lot of the pushback coming because it’s become so overly politicized,” she said.

       Foxx and Chicago police Superintendent David Brown have been at odds over how to deal with increasing gun violence in Chicago.

       Brown recently blamed mass shooting incidents on “strong advocacy in the courts for offenders and very little for victims.” Foxx’s office said Brown was wrong and that 94% of gun cases brought to her office are prosecuted. She blamed the police for failing to get gun offenders off the streets.

       Foxx said statistically, few people out on bail are arrested for other crimes. But she blamed “sensational reporting” about people committing crimes while free on bail for leading judges to see their names connected to such cases. Those judges increasingly opt for electronic home monitoring as an alternative form of detention, she said.

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       “Even as we’ve shifted to try to get more people out on recognizance bond or amounts that they can afford, we have been seeing the doubling of (judges thinking), ‘Well, if they’re going to pay to get out. I’m nervous, so I’m going to put electronic monitoring on them,’” Foxx said.

       Foxx said the “explosion” in the numbers of people being placed on electronic monitoring was part of a “cultural shift” among judges who are not comfortable letting a defendant out and instead are “weaning off of cash bail to the implementation of other forms of confinement, like electronic monitoring.”

       More education in the 18 months leading up to the law’s implementation, she said, would counter the backlash she said she has faced in supporting the new law. Once the law kicks in, judges can still order people detained for specific felony offenses, such as murder or certain gun crimes, or if they pose a threat or are deemed likely to skip their court date.

       “People look at the alleged crime and then they believe, you know, that the punishment comes first. They missed the step in the middle, where we haven’t actually gotten to a trial yet,” she said.

       “It is consistently agreed that cash bail was not serving the needs of our communities. It was not keeping us safer. In fact, it was, in many of our eyes, a detriment to public safety,” she said.

       “And now it is, how do we ensure that we do it right? How do we ensure that what we are doing, not just in Cook County, but when you cross county borders, is safe and fair and equitable and just, and how do we prevent the backlash that we’ve seen across the country?”

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