SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Editor's note: The Office of Statewide Pretrial Services data linked to in the first paragraph is updated daily by 6 p.m.
On Sept. 18, 2023, Illinois became the first state in the country to fully eliminate cash bail. One year later, the state continues to publish data to track the implementation of the SAFE-T Act law and its impact on the state’s criminal justice system.
The data show that judges in the 78 of Illinois' 102 counties served by the Illinois Supreme Court's Office of Statewide Pretrial Services had collectively issued failure to appear warrants in 5% of 41,733 court dates, as of Tuesday.
The OSPS provides pretrial safety assessments in those 78 counties. In the Quad City region, it does not include Rock Island, Knox, Warren and Henderson counties, through Rock Island State's Attorney Dora Villarreal told News 8 the Circuit Clerk to working to report its data to the state. It just recently began providing services in Carroll County in July and Jo Daviess County in September.
Under the law, prosecutors can petition judges to detain a defendant based on the seriousness of the alleged crime or the defendant's flight risk. OSPS has completed 22,500 pretrial investigations since cash bail ended. Of those, 61%, or 13,656 were for defendants accused of a felony. OSPS provides those individual reports to judges, public defenders and prosecutors prior to the defendant's first appearance in court.
The state is also tracking the most serious charges within the pretrial investigation. The majority, 8,170, are for Class A Misdemeanors.
Of the 22,500 investigations, OSPS found 52% of cases contained at least one offense considered detainable under the SAFE-T Act. Prosecutors have petitioned to detain the defendant in 60% of those cases, and judges approved 63% of those requests.
"The data tells us that despite all of the concern before the law took effect, that once it did, every single stakeholder, from the judge to the prosecution to the defense to our Pretrial Services Agency, everyone's doing their job," said OSPS Director Cara Smith. "You'd be concerned if we saw that State's Attorneys are filing in 100% of the cases they could, and judges are granting in 90% of the cases."
Smith stressed it's still early on in the implementation of the law and they'll continue to learn more about how it's working. Different counties within the state have their variances as well.
"But like I said, the data seems very reasonable to me," Smith said. "Prosecutors are making their tough decisions on which cases to see detention on and not. And then judges are making the very tough calls based on the evidence and the information before them."
She said by the end of this year, OSPS will serve 82 counties in the state.
You can view the data OSPS has gathered from our hometown counties below. Again Rock Island, Knox, Warren and Henderson counties do not currently receive pretrial services from OSPS, and it just recently began working with Carroll and Jo Daviess counties.
