New Research Documents Need For Deep Reform of Cook County Criminal Court Culture

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In their new study documenting a litany of failings in the operation of the Cook County Felony Courts at 26th Street and California Avenue in Chicago, “How Culture Impacts Courtrooms: An Empirical Study of Alienation and Detachment in the Cook County Court System” (“study”), four law faculty authors conclude that “both historically and today, a general culture of delay, court inefficiencies, and racialized inequities suffuse the criminal courts in Cook County” and that these courts’ “lack of accountability, transparency, and system delay constitute structural-level failures that create and perpetuate cyclical courtroom dysfunction.”

In the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2022), authors Hawilo, Albrecht, Rountree, and Geraghty outline the dysfunctions and abuses observed during four months and 3,144 minutes of court-observations. The study details the following failings:

  • Court personnel effectively excluding the public from court proceedings by providing no or inaccurate time and location information;
  • Repeatedly delayed court hearings because of absent unprepared defense attorneys, unavailable police witnesses, or deputies bringing defendants to the wrong courtrooms;
  • Court delays from seemingly inexplicable frequent recesses;
  • Court hearings that are unintelligible because of arcane legal language or inaudibility;
  • Monthly status checks that are usually unproductive and unnecessary and therefore waste valuable court and attorney time as well as frustrate those interested in cases’ progress, including the defendants, their families, and witnesses; and
  • Rude and often racially insensitive treatment of the public by some court personnel.

The study recognizes that many of these dysfunctions result from the failure of individual court personnel to perform their jobs with needed care, competence, or civility. But, most importantly, it locates the responsibility for these failings’ continued pervasiveness in the court administration’s failure to implement systems for holding court personnel accountable for their failings.

Even when court personnel are doing their best, however, the study concludes that other dysfunctions would persist because the court is structured to guarantee both inefficiency and non-transparency. For example, the court’s failure to enable the public to understand what is going on in court hearings, to know why cases are continually delayed, and even to learn when and where court proceedings will take place are attributed to a bureaucratic system that cares little for the public’s interest in judicial transparency. And, as the study documents – perhaps the greatest failing of the Cook County Criminal Courts – its enormous backlog of cases that keeps presumed innocent defendants incarcerated unnecessarily and delays vindication for crime victims and their families cannot be remedied without major restructuring of how the courts conduct their operations.

The study recognizes that the many court failings it documents should not come as a surprise to those who frequent the 26th Street courtrooms, and thereby have likely become accustomed to the types of incivility, unfairness, and inefficiency that the study documents. It is very telling that, as the study points out, a 1968 empirical study of the functioning of Cook County criminal courts by two eminent legal scholars shows that over the last 50 years there has been little, if any, improvement in how court personnel approach serving the public: 

The behavior of some functionaries in the municipal courts suggests that they are unaware that the system exists to serve the public…The more common problem is simple indifference or even hostility toward the people the system is intended to serve…The crowded, raucous atmosphere of petty criminal courts and the often-rude conduct of court personnel, to cite two examples, probably affect the rich defendant as much as the poor.

Dallin H. Oaks & Warren Lehman. (1968). A Criminal Justice System and the Indigent: A Study of Chicago and Cook County.

What clearly has changed in those years, however, is the widespread recognition that these court dysfunctions are particularly damaging to the communities of color that are disproportionately subjected to their processes.

The study explains how the combination of these various court dysfunctions have a toxic societal effect in engendering in such communities “legal cynicism (which) is a cultural process whereby individuals and communities come to believe that the law will not protect them the way it should and therefore become detached and alienated from the legal system alleged to protect them.” The study makes clear how the criminal courts have subjected these communities to a tragic paradox; on the one hand, they suffer the highest levels of crime and, therefore, are most in need of the courts’ protection; on the other hand, what they most often get from those courts is ineffectiveness, disrespect and abuse.

As to going forward, the study looks to the Illinois Supreme Court for remedies: “Without increased Illinois Supreme Court leadership and oversight of Illinois’ lower courts, the chronic historical and present-day failures of Cook County’s criminal courts will continue.” The Council notes that the Supreme Court has promulgated as its four core values, “Accountability,” “Fairness,” “Integrity” and “Respect,” and has made implementation of those values the subjects of its Strategic Plan first adopted in 2019. Were these values to somehow be actualized in the operations of the Cook County Criminal Courts, the dysfunctions identified by the study would clearly be ameliorated.

We urge both the Circuit Court of Cook County and the Illinois Supreme Court to review this article carefully and consider ways to ameliorate the injustice. 

By John Elson, Professor of Law Emeritus and Director of the Civil Litigation Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law & Member of the Board of Governors of the Chicago Council of Lawyers.