In her op-ed “The electronic monitoring system is broken”
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(Aug. 19), Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen Burke essentially argues that charges alone should determine who is jailed pretrial, ignoring vital legal principles and laws.The presumption of innocence and due process are the foundation of our criminal legal system. The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed decades ago that “in our society, liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial … is the carefully limited exception.” The Pretrial Fairness Act, critical racial justice legislation Burke claims to support, requires that a judge look at the facts of each individual case and circumstances of each person when deciding whether someone should be jailed awaiting trial.
In reality, Burke has continuously undermined the Pretrial Fairness Act. She has issued policies limiting the discretion of prosecutors by requiring them to seek detention in all cases in which certain allegations are made and requiring them to object whenever an accused person is placed on electronic monitoring, despite research showing that even people on electronic monitoring facing serious charges succeed while awaiting trial.
Burke, a former appellate court justice who has reviewed hundreds of unique cases and made individual rulings on them, should know better.
Researchers at Loyola University have shown that Burke’s policies have caused a dramatic increase in pretrial jailing, even though crime began trending downward before she took office. Adopting Burke’s electronic monitoring proposals would only worsen the problem.
Judges are not struggling to detain people they don’t believe to be safe. The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice recently published a report showing that judges granted 74% of detention requests, even when the court’s risk assessment tool identified defendants as low-risk. Since the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect, 94% of people in the community while awaiting trial in Cook County have not been charged with any new violent or person offense while on pretrial release.
Pretrial jailing causes people to lose jobs, housing and custody of their children — destabilization that increases the likelihood that people will be arrested in the future.
Charging decisions should never be the sole basis for deciding who is able to return to the community while their case is pending. In Cook County, approximately half of the detention-eligible cases filed result in dismissal or acquittal.
Burke’s policies undermine public safety, due process and judicial independence. Rather than rolling back reforms she claimed to support, she should actually commit to them.
— Cathryn Crawford, senior policy adviser, Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, Chicago
State’s attorney’s omissions
Thank you for publishing the op-ed by Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen Burke. She mentions many facts about the program with which no one would disagree. There have been many public failures and far too many detainees placed on electronic monitoring, which she notes. She also states that “the Pretrial Fairness Act was founded on a sound principle.” One should not be able to buy oneself out of jail.
The problem with the op-ed is that she leaves out some important points. She states that “the critical question is whether the defendant poses a danger to the public” when a judge is deciding whether or not to jail a person before trial. Yet she leaves out the fact that before the Pretrial Fairness Act, these bond hearings could be as short as 30 seconds to a minute. That is hardly enough time to decide such an important issue. She also leaves out the fact that these hearings could involve monetary negotiations, with the judge asking the defense attorney how much the attorney’s client could afford for bail.
Most importantly, she leaves out the fact that recently, the Illinois Supreme Court assigned a task force to come up with solutions to the electronic monitoring problem. This task force includes judges, members of law enforcement, an academic and various stakeholders in the criminal justice system from around the state.
I would like to see another op-ed from the state’s attorney after we hear this group’s recommendations.
— Jan Goldberg, Riverside
Why vaccinating kids matters
Regarding the op-ed “Chicago’s kids deserve better than political theater on vaccines”
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(Aug. 20): As an older pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, I was practicing medicine when several current vaccines were not available. I have seen the consequences of a lack of vaccination in previously healthy children. In the 1980s, I repeatedly did spinal taps to diagnose children with bacterial meningitis. Some of those children developed hearing loss or other disabilities.The promotion of doubt in parents regarding the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is especially frustrating. Measles, cases of which are now increasing in the U.S., is extremely contagious in unvaccinated people. Serious complications such as pneumonia, brain damage and death can occur during acute infection. Even if a child does not experience a severe measles case, that child afterward has an increased risk of other types of infections because measles destroys a significant portion of “memory” immune cells. A child is then at increased risk for influenza, pneumonia and bacterial infections for months to years later.
In addition, a rare but devastating outcome of measles in a young child is subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE, a progressive brain disease. SSPE can happen even after a mild case of measles, typically seven to 10 years after initial infection. Very few physicians practicing in the U.S. today have seen SSPE. As a medical student, I did a rotation with a pediatric neurologist who was a national SSPE expert. I vividly remember the parents seeking this physician’s care, desperate for a cure for this heartbreaking, universally fatal disease in their previously healthy child.
For me, any proposal hindering receipt of the MMR vaccine is deeply upsetting. A friend recently asked me if a resurgence of paralytic polio would convince people of the dangers of not vaccinating their children. I said I do not know. What I do know is that “herd immunity” benefits all of us. I vaccinated my children not just to protect them from serious disease but also because I felt a moral obligation to those around them, including children who cannot be vaccinated due to immunodeficiency or a cancer diagnosis.
While I acknowledge the often-justified mistrust toward U.S. institutions, the only agenda of most pediatricians is working with parents to optimize their children’s health. The benefits of the vaccines the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends have repeatedly been shown to outweigh their risks. All our kids deserve thoughtful vaccine recommendations based on science rather than misinformation and political theater.
— Dr. Barbara Hendrickson, Wilmette
Note to readers
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