Timeline: Decades of delays in the Cook County courts

A new Tribune investigation has revealed that Cook County’s massive criminal court system is now taking more than four years to complete most of the county’s murder cases, with some lasting up to a decade or more. Separating the guilty from the innocent takes longer than courthouses in any city for which comparable data was available, including New York and Los Angeles.

In a four-part series titled “Stalled Justice,” reporters Joe Mahr and Megan Crepeau exposed:

Part 1: How bad the problem is, who’s hurt by it and who pays.

Part 2: How the court machinery frequently breaks down.

Part 3: How judges often fail to control their courtrooms.

Part 4: Steps that officials could take to reform the system.

These findings shouldn’t come as a surprise to Chief Judge Timothy Evans or other officials with oversight over the system. Researchers have been documenting problems in Cook County’s criminal courts for generations, including multiple studies highlighting lengthy and unnecessary delays. By now, according to one recent study, delays are so entrenched in the system that they are considered normal.

Read on for a timeline of how criticism of the courts has evolved over a century and how people in power have largely failed to follow through on recommendations for reform.

1929: New courthouse, bungled cases

The main courthouse opens at 26th Street and California Avenue. That same year, a coalition of legal, business and advocacy groups releases a 1,100-page report that documents incompetence, indifference and corruption in the criminal court system.

Researchers say that in one year the system bungled 10,000 cases, and many “who went free are bombers, murderers, robbers, burglars, rapists, desperate men, whose presence is a constant threat to organized society and the security of property.”

1963: Delays inspire new law

After years of complaints that lawyers were purposely dragging out cases, state leaders push through a major rewrite of Illinois’ criminal procedure laws that includes a statute meant to limit the practice of continuances, in which an attorney gets a judge to stop a hearing and continue it sometime in the future. The new law empowers judges to demand written requests when a delay is sought.

1968: That law isn’t followed

A University of Chicago study on Cook County court delays finds that judges were routinely ignoring the law enacted five years earlier that was meant to curb the practice of continuances.

The law was later tightened in the 1980s to require attorneys to submit written requests for delays, whether or not a judge asked. But that law, too, would be routinely ignored.

1974: Crowded jail leads to action

Cook County Jail pretrial inmates file a class-action lawsuit alleging overcrowding and poor conditions. Hundreds of inmates at times were forced to sleep on the floor, often without blankets or mattresses.

The case eventually leads to a consent decree, which in turn put pressure on courts to lessen case backlogs that contributed to crowding in the jail.

1979: New rules on discovery ignored

After increasing complaints about case delays, criminal court leaders work up new rules that put strict limits on a key phase of cases: discovery, or the sharing of evidence. The rules state that discovery should be complete within 45 days of someone being arraigned.

Later rules reinforce the tight deadline. Both sets of rules are ignored with little consequence.

1980: ‘Court watchers’ dislike what they see

Volunteers watch more than 15,000 proceedings in 42 courts and, while offering some praise, generally criticize the courts for unnecessary continuances and short court days — including one that lasted just 13 minutes.

1983: Operation Greylord reveals bribery scandal

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reveals a three-year undercover bribery investigation known as Operation Greylord that leads to 15 judges being convicted over the next decade, spurring a bigger push for court reform.

1988: Post-Greylord panel finds other problems

A special commission formed after Greylord finds widespread problems in the way Cook County’s courts are run, concluding: “Inefficiency can create conditions conducive to corruption.”

The commission makes several recommendations, including having judges review their peers and, more broadly, improving the “quality” of judges.

1989: Feds criticize Chicago ‘legal culture’

A federally commissioned study blames jail overcrowding on “overly long case processing times” and a “local legal culture” indifferent to delays.

Among other things, the study suggests faster automatic evidence sharing, setting trial dates early in a case, establishing “a strict continuance policy which is carefully monitored” and using a then-new concept called “differentiated case management” that sets time goals for different types of cases, such as drug crimes or murders.

All ideas are largely ignored. It took 16 years before the courts would finally experiment with differentiated case management.

1995: Felony filings hit a peak

With the “war on drugs” in high gear, Cook County sees 47,880 felony cases filed, the most ever.

New felony cases would eventually come down by more than half as drug prosecutions decreased. Even so, case delays generally worsened.

2002: Standards proposed, little enforcement

Amid continued complaints about jail overcrowding and the courts’ slow pace, the chief deputy state’s attorney proposes setting goals that include 1 ½ years to wrap up most murders and 2 ½ years for the most complicated murder cases (such as ones involving multiple defendants or those facing the death penalty).

Court leaders suggest that judges adopt those goals, but no judge is forced to do so.

2005: Feds find continuing problems

Sixteen years after reporting myriad problems with case delays, federally commissioned researchers return and document continued problems, including delays in evidence sharing and returning lab results, police missing court dates and a sustained “local legal culture” that accepts delays as normal.

Researchers again recommend that judges better manage cases.

2006: Whittling at the backlog

In a push to lessen delays, courthouse players — prompted by then-presiding criminal court Judge Paul Biebel — focus on clearing backlogs of older cases.

In a little over a year, they cut the number of 2-year-old cases from above 1,000 to roughly 700. But the success doesn’t last.

2007: More recommendations, few fixes

The Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, finds many of the same problems with the county court that other studies did, including police taking too long to produce reports and lab results, overwhelmed prosecutors and public defenders, and judges unable to control the pace of cases.

Like many researchers before, the group recommends differentiated case management — a concept pushed by top judges but still not embraced by many of the others.

2009: Courts’ own administrator weighs in

The man hired to administer Cook County’s criminal courts publishes a research paper that promotes differentiated case management for Cook County. The paper acknowledges that many cases last longer than the standards the court has loosely adopted, yet many judges see little need for those goals — complicating efforts to limit unnecessary delays.

The court system still does not force judges to use differentiated case management.

2011: Case management form is little used

A top criminal judge, Thaddeus Wilson, develops a boilerplate case management order that judges can use to employ differentiated case management. It lists four tracks for cases, the longest being murder, with a goal of two years to complete.

This comes the same year that the National Center for State Courts, a group often cited by Cook County court officials, sets broader national standards for how long felony cases should take to complete: 98% within one year.

Cook County fails to adopt the national standards, and judges are not required to use Wilson’s template.

2012: Another study, similar recommendations

Five years after its first report, Appleseed publishes another study that focuses on pretrial delays and longer jail stays, noting that even though there are fewer case filings and jail admissions, the jail’s population isn’t shrinking at the same rate.

It blames lingering problems that include, among other things, delayed evidence sharing, police not showing up to court, and broad acceptance of continuances in a courthouse that still hasn’t widely embraced standards for how long cases should last. The report makes recommendations similar to other studies.

2013: Preckwinkle complains to the state

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle asks the state Supreme Court to assign an outside judge to help process case backlogs, saying “unacceptably long” delays are the “first and foremost problem” with the way the county administers justice. She complains that the court won’t release data on the problem and also asks the state to address concerns with pretrial services.

The state court ultimately does only the latter, while referring the issue of case delays back to the local courts.

2014: Jail population shrinks

The number of defendants jailed awaiting trial begins a slow, steady drop.

The decrease comes as the courts make it easier for defendants to post bond and judges broaden the use of electronic monitoring. The movement has been controversial: cheered by reform advocates as more fair, while bemoaned by others who complain that potentially dangerous people are being released.

With jails no longer at capacity, there’s less public pressure on judges to limit case delays.

2015: New York sets an example

More than a year after New York’s chief state judge assigns more judges to the Bronx to work through case backlogs there, he and the mayor of New York City announce a plan to further clear the backlog across the city, which a mayoral aide blamed on “a culture of delay.”

At the time, The New York Times reports that “over 400 people had been locked up for more than two years” awaiting trial at Rikers Island. In comparison, around that same period, Cook County’s jail held fewer detainees but roughly twice as many people who had been awaiting trial for more than two years.

2016: Chicago Reader finds ‘dysfunctional courts’

A Chicago Reader investigation finds that Cook County has “a court system plagued by unnecessary delays,” noting problems that the earlier studies also exposed.

The chief judge’s office responds with a statement that acknowledges the problems, saying they were so entrenched that judges couldn’t fix them alone, and they’d gotten grants to study court delays.

2018: Another call for case management

The county invites the National Center for State Courts in for another study on limiting delays.

While complimentary about some steps the courts had taken, researchers document the usual problems and again recommend that the court adopt differentiated case management systemwide. The study suggests all judges adhere to that system by December 2019, which doesn’t happen.

2020: Pandemic adds to backlog

In March 2020, the court postpones cases, delays trials and suspends most in-person hearings. The pandemic forces the wide adoption of some efficiencies, such as sharing evidence electronically and holding hearings by Zoom, but the slowdown creates an even bigger case backlog.

In September 2020, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that more than 130 people have been held in Cook County jail for at least five years awaiting trial.

2021: Bigger doesn’t have to mean slower

The National Center for State Courts completes a national study revealing, among other things, that court delays aren’t tied to the size of the court and instead are more likely due to the quality of case management.

The same year, Loyola University researchers present county officials with research showing the gap between how long it takes the county to convict defendants and how long it takes courts elsewhere in Illinois.

2022: More reform promises, more critical findings

In January, without addressing past promises to implement differentiated case management, Cook County’s chief judge announces the court will adopt it. But no formal rule is put in place and many judges don’t do it voluntarily.

Later that year, researchers from Loyola, Northwestern and Georgia State universities publish one study that finds the courts are hamstrung by perpetual delays, and another on failures fostered by an insider-vs.-outsider culture — one that may require state intervention to undo.