A year into bail reform, more domestic violence defendants ordered held pending trial in Cook County

A year into Illinois’ bail reform, more people charged with domestic violence in Cook County have been ordered held pending trial compared to the year prior. And with setting bail no longer an option, judges appear to be more deliberative in the initial hearings that determine whether to hold or release a defendant.

While detention does not always equal safety, according to anti-domestic violence advocates, they say they have generally seen judges issue decisions based on actual risk to survivors under the state’s Pre-Trial Fairness Act.

There have been cases where advocates have strongly disagreed with a judge’s interpretation of a law, most notably a recent decision by a Cook County judge to release a man charged with attacking his wife. The man allegedly killed the woman weeks later.

There is still work to be done to ensure prosecutors and judges are using all the tools available to them under the new law, but all advocates who spoke with the Sun-Times agree this new system appears to be working better overall than the prior.

“We believe that we are moving in the right direction,” said Amanda Pyron, executive director of the Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence.

“We know that counties across Illinois have invested significant amounts of resources in improving their systems to have a focus on risk and not wealth, and we think that is a benefit to survivors. What we’re hoping continues to improve is inclusion of victims and witnesses in the pretrial process … because ultimately, victims are the experts in their own safety.”

The Pre-Trial Fairness Act, which took effect in September 2023, eliminated cash bail in hopes of ending wealth-based jailing but still allows for detention of people charged with violent crimes. Both misdemeanor and felony domestic violence charges are listed under the law as detainable offenses.

The law was supported by the Network, a coalition of several advocacy groups, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, and the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence — who argued the old money-based system did little to keep survivors of domestic and sexual violence safe.

Before, a defendant could be issued a money bond and walk out of jail at any moment. Now, survivors and advocates know at the initial hearing whether a defendant will be released.

“When you know somebody is (or is) not in custody, it takes a big portion of safety planning off of advocates’ plates, because so much of our safety planning was … ‘How do we know if they get released? What are the safety measures we have to put in place if they randomly walk out of 26 and Cal at 3 a.m.?” says Tessa Kuipers, legal advocacy program director at Family Rescue.

“To be able to know, this person is in custody or this person is out, we can adjust the safety planning for the actual need, as opposed to the anticipated change,” she says.

Bail reform by the numbers

The year before bail reform, 182 defendants facing domestic violence charges in Cook County were ordered held without bail, according to data from the state’s attorney’s office. That was 1.5% of total domestic violence cases that year.

In the first year of bail reform, prosecutors filed petitions for detention in 16% of the 13,326 domestic violence cases. About two of every five of those requests were granted, meaning 875 individuals or 6.6% of those charged with domestic violence were ordered to be detained pending trial, according to data from the Circuit Court of Cook County.

Of those who were charged with domestic violence in Cook County this past year and released pretrial, 5% failed to appear for a scheduled court hearing.

While advocates see the low failure-to-appear rate as a positive, they are cautious not to overanalyze rates of detention.

“It’s difficult to interpret real outcomes from those numbers,” Pyron says. “Arrest and incarceration are sometimes the right answer, but they’re not always the right answer. … So you can’t look at those numbers and say definitively that people are safer because those are the rates of detention.”

Judges digging deeper

In general, anti-gender-based violence advocates have noticed judges spending more time on initial appearance hearings and considering more factors in their decision-making.

This was also seen by Loyola researchers who sat in on court hearings in Cook, Lake, McLean and Winnebago counties before and after implementation of the law.

Before the law, the median length of a bond hearing — to determine if a person would be released and what their monetary bail would be — was between four and six minutes.

Now the median length of detention hearings in those four counties is between 10 and 30 minutes.

“Listening to the judges — when they’re making these decisions, go into the history, go into the risk towards the victim and the community at large — I think it’s really, really promising that this law allows them to take those things into consideration,” says Loren Gutierrez of Legal Aid Society of Metropolitan Family Services.

Discrepancies across counties

Across the state, the majority of detainable cases filed involved domestic violence charges, according to a report from the Loyola University Chicago Center for Criminal Justice Research.

Numbers for detention have varied across counties, with some collar counties filing petitions to detain in domestic cases at much higher rates than Cook’s 16%.

In McHenry County, petitions to detain were filed in about 45% of the 518 domestic violence cases. In DuPage, prosecutors sought detention in 56% of 1,630 domestic violence cases.