Another hearing. Another delay.
This is what passes for progress in the Cook County criminal courts, a system that a Tribune investigation found is failing at its most essential function: ensuring fair and timely justice.
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.
Part 1: Yearslong delays in murder cases break rules, inflict pain and gouge taxpayers
Advocates nationally aim for murder cases to take no more than a year. Cook County’s goal is a little more than two years. But it’s now taking more than four to complete most of the county’s murder cases, with some lasting up to a decade or more.
“I think what you’re discovering is a crisis,” said Tom Geraghty, a Northwestern University professor emeritus who’s worked in and studied the county’s courts for decades. “I mean four years to wait for a trial is ridiculous. Two years is ridiculous.”
Experts and advocates agree that justice shouldn’t be rushed, but in Cook County the pace of prosecution for murder cases has slowed to a near standstill.
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.
And victims’ families must wait years for justice.
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Part 2: From missing evidence to no-show cops, Cook County court machinery jams at every turn
To identify the underlying reasons for the courts’ slow pace, the Tribune conducted an in-depth review of more than two dozen randomly selected pending murder cases that had lasted four years or longer. Reporters pored over thousands of documents, observed dozens of hearings in those cases, and spoke with defendants, victims’ family members and attorneys.
What emerged was a series of breakdowns so common they barely register with courthouse insiders. They are baked into the culture, accepted by most as part of doing business in a calcified system.
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Part 3: Judges could push the pace on slow-moving murder cases. Most of them don’t.
It is a long-standing reality in Cook County criminal courts: Each courtroom is its own little kingdom, controlled by a judge with license to run their docket however they please. Every day, every judge gets to choose how aggressively to push for progress in a deeply dysfunctional system.
They can stay hands-off and work at an excruciatingly slow pace. At the other extreme, they can berate attorneys for every perceived misstep in an attempt to keep cases from dragging.
“Many people talk about there being one criminal justice system (in Cook County),” Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr.cq once told county officials. “Actually, there are probably hundreds of criminal justice systems.”
To see how these differences play out in court, the Tribune observed multiple hearings in two courtrooms on opposite ends of the spectrum.
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Part 4: As delays worsen, officials have failed to embrace reforms. Here are steps they could take.
A decade ago, the court systems in both New York City and Chicago were so backlogged that hundreds of people had been sitting in jail for more than two years while awaiting trial.
But only one of these places treated the situation like a crisis.
In New York, the state’s top judge stepped in, ordering teams of judges into slow courthouses to finish old cases, then announcing a plan with New York City’s mayor, police and court system to find out what led to the backlog and fix it.
And in Chicago? No teams of judges to address backlogs, no big interagency plans, not even any public acknowledgment from the courts of a serious problem that has only worsened in that 10-year window
How we reported this investigation
To document the problem, reporters obtained and analyzed data from several sources. They also 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.
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Timeline: Decades of studies, decades of inaction
For 50 years, study after study has documented serious problems. Yet judges show little alarm and won’t discuss the issues in a system that, by design, limits transparency and accountability.
Stalled Justice: As Cook County courts fail to address delays that erode justice, a neighboring system shows reform is possible
When a defendant appearing in court has been jailed for a lengthy period, a color-coded spreadsheet alerts the judge that the case has been dragging.
Instead of hearings that last only a minute or two — just long enough to set a date for the next hearing — judges often explore whether a delay is necessary and set firm deadlines for attorneys.
Outside of court, the major players in the court system talk regularly about ways to ensure cases don’t stall, aiming to avoid delays that can be agonizing for victims, witnesses and defendants alike.
This is the scenario in the Kane County criminal courts, 40 miles west of Cook County and miles ahead of its larger counterpart in addressing problems that can slow the pace of justice to a near-standstill.
Stalled Justice: Lawsuit on boy’s 2011 death is long over, but Cook County still hasn’t tried his mom for murder
On a sweltering July evening 12 years ago, medics raced to a Midlothian apartment and found a bleeding and badly bruised toddler struggling to breathe.
The little boy was too far gone to save. Soon came questions of who was to blame. Two court cases were launched in separate courthouses — showing two very different versions of what justice looks like in Cook County.
Stalled Justice update: Cook County prosecutors take step to streamline evidence tracking in court system long plagued by delays
In a move that could help speed up prosecution of notoriously slow criminal cases, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office will more comprehensively store and track digital evidence, officials said.
A new system is set to be rolled out for adult felony cases Monday, soon after the Tribune published a four-part series chronicling how Cook County murder cases linger on the dockets longer than ever, and longer than any other big-city court that can be measured.
Stalled Justice update: Notoriously slow Cook County courts will begin tracking why cases are delayed
As the pace of justice in Cook County has grown slower and slower, leaders of the criminal court system have failed for years to implement a first step toward reform: collecting data on why cases get delayed.
Now that finally may be changing.
Six months after the baiduhai published its “Stalled Justice” investigation, court officials told the Tribune they soon will begin recording the reason that a criminal case gets pushed to another date — a step that experts have long recommended so the county can better understand and target issues that can drag out cases for years.
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Stalled Justice Update: Slow Cook County courts see progress in 2023, but some decade-old cases still linger on dockets
Shawn Jones has spent 12 years jailed without a trial — a “pure hell” that he hopes will end soon with a new judge who has been pushing to give Jones his day in court.
Elsewhere in the massive Cook County court system, Donna Wuchter is losing hope the courts will ever hold a trial for the man accused of killing her friend. She has been waiting for 11 years and counting, enduring a cycle of delays she sums up with one word: “craziness.”
The two cases help sum up the situation in the notoriously slow Cook County courts since the Tribune published its “Stalled Justice” investigation in April: hints of progress but enormous challenges remaining.