STALLED JUSTICE
Yearslong delays in Cook County murder cases break rules, inflict pain and gouge taxpayers
Every month or two, a mourning mother and the man accused of killing her son journey to a Cook County courtroom for another seemingly pointless hearing.
Corniki Bornds’ only child was shot in the head six years ago. Early on, the grief was so jarring that her mind used to freeze up at every court hearing. Now, 70-plus hearings into the 2017 case, each appearance instead fuels disgust and agony, like “pouring salt in an open wound.”
Zeron Moody was charged with the murder. He describes a different torment: that of a young father jailed for much of his 20s with no trial date in sight for him or his co-defendant. The long delay gets “harder as the years go on,” his depression so intense he recently threw himself down a flight of jail stairs.
Once Bornds and Moody are in the same courtroom — one after waiting in a long security line, the other after winding through a long tunnel from the jail — the hearings typically last a minute or two. Nothing much happens. Lawyers and the judge pick another date to meet. Another hearing. Another delay. This is what passes for progress in the Cook County criminal courts, a system that a Tribune investigation found is failing at its most essential function: ensuring fair and timely justice.
In an unprecedented review of murder cases, the Tribune found Cook County’s courts are taking longer than ever to separate the guilty from the innocent — longer than courthouses in any city for which comparable data was available, including New York and Los Angeles. Delays here were growing before the pandemic, and have been getting worse since.
Advocates nationally aim for murder cases to take no more than a year. Cook County’s goal is a little more than two years. But it’s now taking more than four to complete most of the county’s murder cases, with some lasting up to a decade or more.
“I think what you’re discovering is a crisis,” said Tom Geraghty, a Northwestern University professor emeritus who’s worked in and studied the
county’s courts for decades. “I mean four years to wait for a trial is ridiculous. Two years is ridiculous.”
Experts and advocates agree that justice shouldn’t be rushed, but in Cook County the pace of prosecution for murder cases has slowed to a near standstill.
Murder defendants typically linger in jail longer than a presidential term. For those wrongfully accused, the process costs years with their families on the outside. Taxpayers are left to foot the bill for tens of millions a year in extra jail housing costs.
And victims’ families must wait years for justice.
To document the problem, reporters interviewed courthouse attorneys, defendants, victims’ families and their advocates, while filing three dozen record requests, poring over more than 40 case files and attending more than 1,000 hearings.
Among the findings: Historic delays: In cases concluded before the pandemic, more than 80% took longer than the court’s two-year goal. Last year, it was nearly 90%. Some cases linger a decade or more. One is so old that its evidence includes the alleged use of a Blockbuster video card.
A big-city outlier: Delays have ballooned more in Cook County than other parts of Illinois. And delays are worse here than in any other large court system experts have studied, from Philadelphia to the Bronx.
Broken rules and laws: Cook County judges and attorneys ignore official court timetables for tasks without punishment. Judges don’t enforce a state law requiring attorneys put requests for delays in writing, supported by sworn statements.
Action without progress: Court hearings can eventually number in the 50s, 60s and 70s for each murder case, with little accomplished.
Untamed bureaucracy: As defendants sit in jail, police can take years to turn over all their evidence to prosecutors. Attorneys can take years to draft and file pretrial motions on how to interpret the evidence. Judges can take years to schedule pretrial hearings, which routinely get delayed because cops don’t show up to testify.
Failing leadership: For 50 years, study after study has documented serious problems. Yet, from Chief Judge Timothy Evans on down, judges show little alarm and won’t discuss the issues in a system that, by design, limits transparency and accountability. No one comprehensively tracks why cases are delayed.
The investigation revealed a system in which the people with the power to limit delays — including judges, police and attorneys — have little incentive to do so, while the people who pay the price — defendants, victims and witnesses — are largely powerless to speed up things.
The law technically allows defendants to demand a speedy trial within months of arrest. But defendants and attorneys have told the Tribune they’d be foolish to do so because it would risk missing the chance to review and challenge the evidence prosecutors want to present.
At the top of the county courts is Evans, among the last political survivors of rough-and-tumble 1970s Chicago ward politics. He spent nearly two decades on City Council, then lost a bid for mayor before becoming a judge, then the chief judge. He’s kept that job for nearly 22 years by continuing to win an internal vote taken among the very judges he’s supposed to be supervising.
Evans would not agree to an interview with the Tribune, instead issuing a statement that did not respond directly to many of the Tribune’s questions. In that statement, his office downplayed the Tribune’s findings, saying murders make up just 1% of all felonies and overall court performance has been improving since the worst of the pandemic slowdowns.
“Justice and fairness are our most cherished goals,” the chief judge’s office said in its statement, “and judges, as well as all court stakeholders, work diligently to avoid unnecessary delays from the time a case is filed until it is resolved.”
The system’s other major players — prosecutors, public defenders and private attorneys — did not dispute the increase in delays but said they’re working hard to make justice as swift and as fair as possible, in increasingly complex cases amid an explosion of video and forensic evidence.
In an interview, the second in command in State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office acknowledged delays but said prosecutors are often waiting to get and share records from law enforcement, then waiting for the court to work through defense requests to limit what evidence could get in front of a jury.
In a statement, Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr.’s office said it takes time for it to do the “thorough, exhaustive and meticulous” work required to represent indigent clients in a county with high caseloads and notorious for wrongful convictions.
Attorneys and judges in Los Angeles and New York expressed surprise to the Tribune at how long Cook County cases were taking. Academic researchers have chastised the county’s management of its criminal courts in increasingly sharp terms, with one recent study floating the idea of a state takeover.
To critics of the county’s court management, such as Sheriff Tom Dart, the ever-growing delays contribute to feelings of lawlessness, particularly in high-crime neighborhoods. Not only do those residents see many murders go unsolved, they watch “solved” cases stall in a court system seemingly unconcerned about timely justice.
“It poisons the community,” Dart said. “They do feel like the system’s not working.”
GROWING WAITS
On a brisk January night in 2016, Barack Obama was still president. R. Kelly was finishing up a Christmas album. The Cubs hadn’t been to a World Series in seven decades.
Maurice Pearson sat in a cold Chicago police interrogation room, warming his hands inside his shirt. He was three hours into his arrest on suspicion of killing a man during a robbery.
The interrogation turned to what lay ahead for the 19-year-old, a transcript shows. A detective warned Pearson that he could face a judge and jury.
“There’s gonna be other people judging you … whether this happens in a year or two years,” the detective said.
That’s how long Pearson said he thought it would take too.
Fast forward to September 2022. At age 26, in a jailhouse interview with the Tribune, Pearson fidgeted in a hard plastic chair, his hands cuffed behind his back, while lamenting what by then had been a 6½-year wait in Cook County Jail for his day in court.
“But,” he said, taking a breath, “when you’re in here and you’re stuck, you have no choice. You have no choice but to go with the flow.”
It wasn’t always this bad. In the mid-2000s, the county courts completed most murder cases in less than two years, according to studies done at the time.
But by 2011, the median completion time — with half taking more, and half taking less — was roughly three years after an arrest, the Tribune found.
Just before the pandemic, the median was approaching four years.
In 2022, it was nearly five years. At one of the county’s satellite courthouses, in south suburban Markham, murder cases now typically take nearly seven years to complete, the Tribune found.
Another way to look at it: The court wants murder cases completed within two years of an early-stage hearing called an arraignment. That goal was met in a fifth of murder cases completed systemwide in 2019. In 2022, just a tenth met that goal.
The figures come from a Tribune analysis of raw case data collected and published online by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, part of a transparency effort by that office. Reporters tried to get a complete set of official court data to analyze, but the circuit clerk’s office has said since July that it was too busy to provide it.
The delays come into sharper focus when comparing Cook County to other large systems. For defendants awaiting murder trials, the average wait behind bars was notably lower in New York City and Los Angeles County, according to jail data collected last year by the Tribune.
And a Tribune review of Illinois prison data shows that it takes less time to convict people of murder in other parts of the state than it does in Cook County, and that gap is widening.
Perhaps the most striking comparison comes from data collected in the years before the pandemic by the
National Center for State Courts. The respected national group — one often cited by Cook County’s chief judge — studied data from courthouses across the country. One calculation was how often homicide cases were completed in a year or less — considered a gold standard in effective case management.
Some courthouses, including Cook County’s, didn’t participate in the study. For the busiest courts that did, the percentage of murder cases completed within a year ranged from 15% to 71%. For example, in New York City’s five boroughs — which have separate court systems — 19% to 38% of their murder cases were resolved by then.
Those aren’t stellar numbers for advocates who want nearly all felony cases to be completed in a year. But those numbers are blazing fast compared with Cook County’s, where a Tribune analysis of prosecutors’ data shows that mark was met in just 5% of homicide cases completed in 2019.
It can be difficult to compare court systems because each place has a unique set of circumstances — such as sentencing ranges and staffing structures — that can make it easier or harder for cases to progress. For example, some homicide charges in Illinois carry comparatively long mandatory prison terms of at least 45 years, leaving many defendants and their lawyers with little incentive to plead guilty or rush to trial.
But the national study shot down one argument that court officials have made in the past: that bigger court systems like Cook County invariably are slower than smaller ones.
There’s another factor too: whether powerful officials aggressively push to limit delays.
In the past decade, New York officials — including the state’s top judge — publicly pushed plans to tackle their case backlogs. That judge, Jonathan Lippman, told the Tribune “there’s no excuse” for delays to have ballooned in Chicago in ways that let defendants fester in jail for four, five or more years without a trial.
“It’s inhumane. It’s not just,” said Lippman, now retired and of counsel in a New York firm. “And it just defies any view of a system that works.”
LAW, DEADLINES IGNORED
The slow pace of the Cook County courts has been known to academic researchers and state lawmakers since at least the 1960s. Researchers at Loyola, Northwestern and Georgia State universities concluded in one recent study that the county had “structural-level failures that create and perpetuate cyclical courtroom dysfunction.”
That is also the picture that emerged from the Tribune’s reporting.
After charges are filed, the next step is for prosecutors — aided by police — to quickly gather all the evidence and share it with the defense. But that process can get bogged down for years, the Tribune found, as reports, videos and other records slowly make their way to the courthouse in dribs and drabs from police, crime labs, hospitals and others.
The more information that comes in, particularly lengthy video files, the more time attorneys seek to go through it all, adding to delays.
Attorneys then get time to argue over what’s fair to show eventual jurors. That process can also stall a case for years, especially when judges let the motions sit without resolution for months, or police officers fail to appear in court to testify about whether they followed the rules in making the arrest or questioning the defendant.
Other holdups include waits for mental health exams, delays in the cases of co-defendants and other side issues. Attorneys’ heavy caseloads leave little wiggle room on scheduling, so backups in one case can cause slowdowns in others.
How often do each of these things happen? It’s impossible to know, because the court has never put a system in place to comprehensively document why delays occur.
Nor are the courts enforcing what few rules exist about explaining the reasons for delays.
For example, a state law sets up a strict protocol for lawyers who ask a judge for a “continuance” on a case — to end a hearing and resume the case on another date. For all except the earliest hearings in a case, the request must be in writing and supported by a sworn statement.
But that law is routinely ignored, as researchers have repeatedly pointed out and which the Tribune confirmed by examining dockets and case files.
In a Tribune review of 30 older murder cases, reporters found at least 1,500 delays that would appear, by law, to require that lawyers file written motions and sworn affidavits to explain why they wanted to wait. Reporters found no such documents in the files.
Chief Judge Evans’ office did not respond to questions about these omissions. Lawyers, if they knew of the law, brushed it off to reporters as unnecessary or impractical to enforce.
Local court rules also require court clerks to document, in a “memorandum of orders,” the reasons for continuances for all except the earliest hearings in a case. But the court has yet to enforce that, on paper or otherwise. Evans said two years ago that his staff was working
to create a system for clerks to record the reasons electronically, but it hasn’t happened.
Finally, the court isn’t making much use of case-management orders that it developed a decade ago to help move cases along. For example, the judge in a murder case could issue a standard order stating that sharing evidence shouldn’t take more than a year, with another four months to handle pretrial motions and another six months to set up a pretrial conference. If followed, that schedule would result in a trial held within two years of the defendant’s arraignment.
But judges have not widely adopted these orders, the Tribune found. In a review of the dockets for 20 randomly chosen murder cases that began in the first half of 2022, reporters found only one that mentioned the filing of a case management order. In a random review of 2023 cases, just a third mentioned the orders being filed. Evans’ office did not respond to a question about the lack of such orders.
In a court system that offers no data on why delays occur, and where few reasons are documented in court records, the best hints of what’s going on come from attending the hearings.
THE DELAY FACTORY
For murder cases, most of those hearings occur at the county’s main courthouse, a century-old limestone building in Little Village. Its official name is the Honorable George N. Leighton Criminal Court Building, for the late judge and civil rights trailblazer. But the courthouse is better known as “26th Street” or “26th and Cal” — a nod to its location at 26th Street and California Avenue.
The seven-story building has an air of a grand edifice gone slightly shabby — wide, tall hallways with carved stone walls where you might encounter a dead roach, belly-up.
There are spacious older courtrooms boasting high ceilings and dark polished wood, and newer, smaller courtrooms so crammed that the county installed glass walls to keep spectators from crowding the courtroom players. All courtrooms show signs of aging — flaking paint, wallpaper that’s begun to peel.
While courtrooms sometimes host trials or substantive hearings in the afternoon, the busiest part of the day is in the morning, when status hearings are bunched together. It becomes a showcase of delays. Most hearings are officially scheduled for 9 a.m. But judges may not filter in until 10 or later. Their docket may be full — with a dozen or more cases to be called in no particular order — but they frequently take breaks as they wait for the right mix of attorneys and defendants to be present. Judges often walk into back offices, leaving attorneys to make small talk or work on their laptops. Spectators, sitting on hard wooden benches, are not told when court will resume. When the right set of players has finally assembled, a hearing typically goes fast, often a minute or two. Attorneys fire off a few sentences to the judge about what they’re doing to inch closer to a trial, like students updating a teacher on a group project, albeit one with no real due date. The update typically devolves into excuses. They could be waiting for others to give them stuff. Or need time to go through files or fashion legal arguments. Or cite any of a host of other unique circumstances, such as being new to the case or struggling to corral witnesses to show up for hearings. Most judges, themselves former prosecutors and defense attorneys, usually accept the lawyers’ statements at face value. Opposing attorneys rarely question them either, instead agreeing to push the case back again. The case is then given what’s called a continuance, typically for another status hearing, in four to six weeks. Defendants are returned to their cells, still with no firm idea of when their fates will be decided, in a process some described as near soul-crushing. The Tribune reached out through the jail to 23 pretrial detainees who’d been locked up at least four years, and often much longer. More than a dozen agreed to be interviewed about the sluggish pace of their cases. Saying they were eager to talk, they each expressed frustration and said they felt powerless over the numerous continuances sought by attorneys. One detainee who wanted to talk was Michael Laster, who at the time had been to court 82 times without resolution to his case. “Honestly, it gets tiresome to go out every month, or two months, and not have any results, or any new updates,” Laster told the Tribune in September. By then, he was waiting for his second trial. The first one, which concluded more than four years after his arrest, was later nullified because of an error — the judge forgot to swear in the jury. Laster’s 83rd appearance came one Monday in October. Around 7 a.m. he began his handcuffed journey to the courtroom from the massive jail complex, a half-mile walk that snaked through underground tunnels. In all, going to court took roughly three hours. He spent most of that time in holding cells: in the jail before entering the tunnels, then in the courthouse basement, then behind the courtroom. It was all for a hearing that quickly led to another continuance. Laster eventually cut a plea deal — at his 86th court appearance — and admitted helping kill two men in a parking lot dispute in 2015. His sentence meant he will likely spend a decade in state prison, on top of the seven years he was in jail before the plea. Some cases end with little seemingly accomplished other than a lot of time and money spent, such as the 2013 case of Koman Willis. Willis was accused of fatally shooting a 6-month-old baby as she sat on her dad’s lap in a minivan in Woodlawn, in a case that sparked citywide outrage. In Willis’ widely reported first hearing, prosecutors described a pile of evidence against him. In a separate, packed news conference, then-police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said detectives had needed 2½
months to nail down enough evidence to show Willis’ guilt “in a court of law.” Ultimately, nothing was ever shown. In a review of dozens of court transcripts, the Tribune found years of delays while prosecutors gathered all the evidence, then years of delays in assembling it all for a rotation of private defense attorneys and public defenders, who made their own requests for more records to be gathered.
Along the way, two key prosecution witnesses died: one by gunshot, the other in a car crash. Another recanted his story.
In June 2020, Willis got a new attorney — his sixth, and the third one he’d privately hired. The attorney, Jed Stone, soon began prodding prosecutors to provide records for a trial.
Records show the prosecutors’ office began trying to track down any potentially helpful remaining witnesses, with little success.
Soon prosecutors dropped all charges, at an anticlimactic hearing, telling the judge that “the evidence in this case is in a different posture” than it was in 2013.
That was in December 2020 — at the case’s 76th court hearing, or 2,760 days after Willis had been arrested. Another way to look at it: By then, the 6-monthold he was accused of killing would have been in second grade, had she survived.
When reached by the Tribune this year, Willis said he’d moved on and declined to comment further.
Recalling the case two years later, his final attorney, Stone, said it reflected a court system indifferent to the people who are forced to endure it, victims and suspects alike, most of them poor and nonwhite.
“Everybody was expendable. Nobody cared,” he said. “Nobody cared.”