It’s remarkable that as Illinois state lawmakers make police misconduct data more transparent under their 764-page SAFE-T Act, they’ve totally ignored needed reforms to bring similar transparency to felony criminal case sentencing. In places like Cook County, where horrific crimes by repeat offenders are daily news, residents should know who’s responsible.
Constituents should be able to see at the click of a mouse whether there was an acquittal, a dropped prosecution, a plea deal or a sentence issued. What were the case details? The actual punishment? What were the defendant’s pending felony charges, prior convictions, sentences, and actual time served? As with officers decertified by the state, what are the names of felony defendants? And if cops can be searched by names for certification status, so should prosecutors and judges, too, be searchable, for their case-by-case courtroom outcomes.
Yet in drafting their ginormous criminal justice reform bill, lawmakers sidestepped criminal case sentencing accountability. They failed to mandate that county courts disclose online the actual outcomes in criminal felony proceedings. And when the chance to vote for local judges comes up, voters are completely in the dark. There’s little to see except for Bar Association ratings so vague and politicized as to be meaningless.
Those are glaring gaps in transparency that lawmakers should remedy in their planned post-election fall veto session fixes to the SAFE-T Act.
Contrast that to what they’ve legislated for the police. Legislators had no problem mandating (p. 748) the creation of an online searchable public database that will let you look up officers by name who are certified by the state, and those decertified for misconduct. A companion database (p. 749), also to be publicly available online and searchable, will outline individual state decertification probes of local police, leaving out officer names.
Online access to documents for criminal cases? “Prohibited”
Today, Cook County residents can review the online dockets of cases in court divisions like civil, chancery, domestic relations, child support, probate, traffic, and naturalization. But online access to the details of criminal cases like armed robbery, assault, burglary, criminal sexual assault and murder aren’t available.
If you’re a Cook County resident who cares about the sentences handed down to criminals, you’ll have to take time off from work and drive or brave crime-ridden Chicago transit to get to the criminal courts building at 26th Street and California Avenue, in order to physically access case documents.
A first-rate news organization called CWB Chicago does exactly that – it physically goes to the courts – and reports the often-horrifying results. CWB’s work is highly commendable but inevitably piecemeal and focused on just one Illinois county.
Online transparency reforms on sentencing information are badly overdue. Illinoisans across the entire state deserve felony sentencing information to be as easily accessible online as a police officer’s certification status.
Creating more transparency for sentencing
The transparency reforms we’re suggesting have already been contemplated. The Supreme Court’s Electronic Access Policy (p. 6) seems to invite state and/or county lawmakers to improve case transparency: “If possible, the following information in court records should be made electronically accessible to the public if it exists in electronic form:…Sentencing information in criminal and quasi-criminal cases.”
But rather than embrace that suggestion, Cook County emphasizes the Access Policy’s current prohibition on showing criminal case documents online. Cook County also doesn’t tell you that the state’s Access Policy says that case information currently barred from online disclosure can be revealed if “explicitly provided by court rule, court order, or law.”
Right now, Cook County judges and prosecutors have little to fear from anyone calling them out about the justice system’s laxity or incompetence. There are only a few citizen watchdogs, like CWB, monitoring sentencing of criminals and calling out abuse of judicial discretion which puts public safety at risk.
Online transparency in criminal sentencing will not improve unless and until lawmakers take the initiative on behalf of law-abiding citizens, rather than on behalf of criminals.
And they won’t do that without a very big push.