![]() ![]() Black people made up 80% of those charged with the nonviolent gun offenses we examined, which included unlawful use of a weapon, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, armed habitual criminal, and FOID card violations. ![]() ![]() said grand juries act as “a virtual rubber stamp for the prosecution.”īlack Chicago residents were most affected by the shift to grand juries. The office’s chief data officer said last year that “we might be creating a lot of people that will forever be marked as a felon.” Most of those people are young Black men who may not have been able to afford the paperwork or meet the requirements to legally carry a gun in Illinois.Ī spokesperson for Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said Illinois law gives prosecutors discretion to use preliminary hearings or grand juries to prosecute felonies and said the office “makes determinations based on the facts, evidence and the law, and uses the tools available within the criminal justice system to administer justice.”īut a spokesperson for Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has aggressively prosecuted gun possession cases, even as officials have said publicly that nonviolent gun arrests brought as many as 1,400 people with no prior felony convictions into the criminal justice system in 2020 alone. ![]() In 2017, approximately 75% of defendants in gun cases pleaded guilty - the highest rate since 2010, according to our analysis. The effect has been clear: As Chicago police officers make hundreds more gun-possession arrests each year, those cases are less likely to go to trial and more likely to end in a guilty plea. Since 2015, Cook County prosecutors have brought nearly all gun-possession cases through grand juries. There are two ways felony cases move through the court system: Grand juries, which meet in secret and rarely decide not to indict, and preliminary hearings, where prosecutors present their case to a judge and defense attorneys can raise issues with the arrest. “When they go into plea bargaining, they have more power,” she said. Sarah Staudt, a former defense attorney who now works on criminal justice policy at Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, said grand juries make it much harder for defendants to weigh the risks of taking a case to trial if they are indicted than preliminary hearings because the prosecutors and police can “tightly control” the evidence in the case for much longer under the grand jury process. (The Circuit has requested, but not yet received, court data from 2019 to present from the Office of the Chief Judge.) From 2016 to 2018, prosecutors brought more than 95% of those cases through grand juries, according to an analysis of decades of Cook County court data conducted by The Circuit. There are two ways that felony cases move through the court system: Grand juries, which meet in secret for a month straight, hear hundreds of cases, and rarely decide not to indict, and preliminary hearings, where prosecutors present their case to a judge and defense attorneys have the opportunity to argue that the arrest should be thrown out.īefore 2014, about 25% of cases in Cook County where illegal gun possession was the top charge went through grand juries. This story is part of The Circuit, a joint project of the nonprofit news organizations Better Government Association and Injustice Watch, in partnership with the civic tech consulting firm DataMade. ![]()
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