Illinois state officials say reforms put in place earlier have significantly eased the crushing burden that had buried state appeals courts under an avalanche of appeals from accused criminals seeking to use a controversial Illinois law that eliminated cash bail to challenge judges' orders keeping them in jail while they await trial.
In March, the Illinois Supreme Court issued orders adopting the recommendations of a judicial task force assigned to find ways to ease the burden imposed on state appellate courts by criminal defendants and their lawyers under the so-called SAFE-T Act.
And in the months following their enactment, data supplied by the court showed the number of those appeals had plummeted to less than 15% of their initial number.
The data was supplied in response to questions from The Record.
According to the information table presented by the court, the number of appeals challenging pretrial detention orders numbered 1,041 from January 1 to April 12, 2024.
But in the next three months, after the court changed rules governing such appeals, the number of those appeals dropped to 154 total.
That number of new appeals still would mark a large increase compared to the years prior to the enactment of the SAFE-T Act and its associated reforms. In a report this spring, for instance, the court's Pretrial Release Appeals Task Force noted the state appeals courts had handled only 171 such pretrial detention appeals in the previous 10 years, combined.
But Illinois Fourth District Appellate Court Justice Eugene G. Doherty, who chaired Pretrial Release Task Force, said the numbers of appeals are down 88% from their all-time highs at the beginning of the year.
"The Task Force wasn't just trying to reduce the volume of appeals, but to ensure that the option of an appeal from pretrial detention orders remained viable," Doherty said in a statement emailed to The Record.
"We think we found the sweet spot, meaning that the door remains wide open to appeal when trial counsel makes the reasoned judgment that an appeal should be taken. What has been lost are the rote, pro forma appeals that were contributing substantially to the volume.”
The task force was empaneled by the Illinois Supreme Court in response to unprecedented numbers of appeals filed by defendants seeking release from jail while they awaited trial on criminal charges.
Those appeals had been allowed under prior court rules in place at the time the SAFE-T Act eliminated cash bail in Illinois and rewrote the rules governing when and how accused criminals can be kept in jail pending trial or released.
The law was enacted in 2021 by Gov. JB Pritzker and Democrats in the General Assembly, as progressive lawmakers seized on anti-police sentiment stirred up amid the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020 to push through a top to bottom reform of Illinois' criminal justice system.
The cornerstone of the law, however, was a provision abolishing the state's traditional cash bail system. The law essentially flipped the question of pre-trial detention entirely, entitling accused criminals to release from custody while they await trial, unless prosecutors can persuade a judge that releasing the defendant would present a danger to the community or that the defendant is a flight risk who otherwise would not show up to trial.
Those bail elimination provisions took effect in September 2023, after the Illinois Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge from dozens of county state's attorneys asserting the bail elimination provisions were unconstitutional and would lead to significant problems for Illinois communities and courts.
Under the new provisions, numerous published reports have indicated a growing number of criminal defendants, including those accused of repeated violent crims, have been released back into the community, despite the charges against them, resulting in more crimes.
Supporters of the law have called such concerns overblown, asserting the past cash bail system also did little to ensure public safety, as judges were still allowed to release criminal defendants on bond.
Most recently, some in Illinois' criminal justice system have said their data shows the SAFE-T Act's reforms have resulted in increases in crime by those on pre-trial release compared to those released under cash bail and significant increases in defendants skipping court dates.
In McHenry County, for instance, State's Attorney Patrick Kenneally called the SAFE-T Act an "abject failure," particularly faulting the law for leading to a 280% increase in failures to appear in court.
And in Cook County, Circuit Court Clerk Iris Martinez notably stated in a letter to Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans that as many as three-fourths of all criminal defendants in Cook County may have failed to appear for required court hearings in the 12 months that followed the effective date of the cashless bail law.
Martinez said her office logged more than 67,000 failures to appear during that time, which she said placed a heavy burden on her office and the courts overall.
Both Martinez and Kenneally are set to be replaced in their offices, as Martinez was defeated in the Democratic primary election earlier this spring and Kenneally decided not to seek reelection, citing family concerns. Kenneally is being replaced by his former top assistant state's attorney, also a Republican, who ran unopposed this November.
Evans and other supporters of the SAFE-T Act have pushed back on the assertions from Martinez, Kenneally and other critics of their reforms. They say the failure to appear numbers are boosted by a misapprehension of the data, as the reforms intentionally include more opportunities for defendants to show up in court before a judge may take action against them.
They say the majority of people who initially miss court will typically "return voluntarily when given the chance."
However, as the courts grapple with such debate over the actual number of scofflaw defendants under the SAFE-T Act, the state's appeals courts also struggled to address an indisputable problem that flowed from the enactment of the reform law:
An avalanche of pretrial detention appeals.
According to a report issued March 1 by the Pretrial Release Appeals Task Force, criminal defendants who were not immediately released pending trial have used the SAFE-T Act's appeal provisions to swamp the state courts with petitions seeking to overturn their detention orders.
According to that report, in the five months after the SAFE-T Act's cashless bail system took effect, Illinois appellate courts received more than 1,900 appeals from criminal defendants challenging judges' decisions to hold them in jail.
The report noted that under the previous system, appellate courts handled just 171 such appeals in the previous 10 years combined, "a 268-fold increase in volume."
The report noted the increased ease with which criminal defendants could demand their release before trial would inevitably grind other appellate court operations to a standstill, including slowing the ability of appellate courts to handle appeals of actual criminal convictions.
The report noted ultimately the problems may demand further judicial reforms, potentially including allowing individual appellate judges to handle the appeals, rather than a full panel of three justices. Further reforms could include increasing the number of judges serving on state appeals courts or allowing appeals to be distributed among the state's five appellate districts, rather than force individual appellate courts to handle all appeals filed in their respective districts, regardless of the workload.
Initially, however, the task force recommended immediate changes to weed out meritless appeals of pre-trial detention orders or at least force criminal defendants and their lawyers to do more work before filing such appeals.
In its report, the task force noted a large block of pretrial detention appeals were filed as a "cursory, check-the-box affair," as a matter of right, rather than fully explaining why the criminal defendants should be released.
The task force noted many of these rapid appeals were based in the rules' requirement that such appeals be filed within 14 days of a detention order.
With this in mind, the new rules eliminated that 14-day rule, and gave criminal defendants as long as they wish, up to their trial, to appeal a judge's decision to hold them in jail.
Among other changes, the new rules also:
- Required criminal defendants to file a motion with the lower court seeking "relief" from a detention order, before filing an appeal;
- Blocked criminal defendants from raising issues to the appellate court that were not first raised in their motion for relief in county court. The task force said this would return the appellate courts to their proper role of reviewing a lower court's decision. Criminal defendants are still permitted to file a memorandum more fully explaining their arguments on appeal; and
- Limited criminal defendants to one pre-trial detention appeal at a time, to address the "administrative quagmire" produced by allowing single defendants "to have multiple appeals happening in the same case at the same time." Under the new rules, defendants cannot file an "appeal from a subsequent detention or release order ... while a prior appeal by the same party remains pending in the appellate court."
The rules took effect April 15.
Doherty said the task force's assignment from the court was limited and it is not continuing to meet.
He said there are no further pretrial detention appeal rule change recommendations pending before the state Supreme court or forthcoming from the task force.