Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx says she will not run for reelection

After more than six years marked by historic criminal justice reforms, controversy over her prosecutorial policies and the Jussie Smollett scandal, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said she won’t run for reelection next year.

Elected in 2016 amid fallout from the Laquan McDonald police murder and cover-up, Foxx was a trailblazer in the national movement to elect so-called reform prosecutors who emphasized the need to change the criminal justice system and address its wrongs from within. Her time in office has been roiled by criticism over her mishandling of the Smollett case and pushback against her prosecutorial priorities, including a first-term decision to raise the bar for prosecuting retail thefts as a felony from the statutory threshold of $500 in value for the stolen goods to more than $1,000, unless the defendant has a significant criminal history.

But Foxx supporters argue she has helped usher in a new era of criminal justice in which political candidates can talk about being smarter on crime, not just tougher, while advocating for policies that take a longer view.

“We find ourselves in a cycle of violence that continues because we haven’t addressed the root causes of violence, because we haven’t addressed the rift between communities and law enforcement and we haven’t addressed it because they’re hard truths that need to be told,” Foxx told the Tribune in a wide-ranging interview ahead of a City Club address where she made her choice official. “If nothing else, I have spent the last six and a half years trying to tell the difficult truth about our criminal justice system, about the prosecutor’s office, about law enforcement and the impact that it has had on communities that are the ones most impacted by violent crime and by our justice system.”

Foxx delivered remarks Tuesday to a crowd that included people who have been wrongfully convicted, assistant state’s attorneys and Anjanette Young, a Chicago woman who was wrongly handcuffed while undressed during a botched police raid.

“I leave with my head held high, my heart full, knowing that there are better days ahead,” Foxx told the crowd.

Initially an underdog candidate, Foxx handily beat incumbent Anita Alvarez in a campaign largely marked by the teen’s murder, though Foxx announced her campaign before the McDonald scandal erupted. After Foxx won, she pledged to a jubilant crowd to rebuild a broken criminal justice system in Cook County while acknowledging it couldn’t be changed overnight. She was previously chief of staff for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and spent 12 years as a Cook County prosecutor, mostly in the juvenile system.

In 2020, Foxx fought off a well-funded challenge by former Assistant State’s Attorney Bill Conway and two other challengers to win the Democratic primary and easily trounced a Republican rival to earn a second term. She has spent parts of the past few years as a punching bag for more conservative Chicago politicians including Mayor Lori Lightfoot and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, who sometimes blamed her for high crime.

Asked why she isn’t running for a third term, Foxx said she promised her family that she would leave after two. She said she hasn’t “allowed myself the whimsy to think” of her next step.

“I’m really proud of the work that we have done on running the second largest prosecutor’s office in the middle of a pandemic and still doing the work,” Foxx said. “And I work with a really incredible group of prosecutors who put this system on their back because the obligation to be ready for trial falls on us. And they’ve done that, whether it is getting a guilty (verdict) in the murder of Commander Paul Bauer or the murder of Tyshawn Lee or the countless other cases whose names don’t make headlines, our prosecutors are holding people accountable.”

Reforms

Foxx has drawn on her upbringing in the Cabrini-Green public housing development, advocating for a more equitable criminal justice system that seeks to address systemic racism and cycles of poverty that fuel violence.

In addition to implementing a higher threshold for prosecutors to pursue felony charges for retail theft, she took on a number of other progressive priorities for reform during her first term, kicking off a broad effort to mass expunge low-level marijuana convictions ahead of legalization in Illinois and announcing that prosecutors would no longer oppose release of some nonviolent defendants if they were too poor to pay bail.

Foxx was one of few state’s attorneys in Illinois who publicly supported the elimination of cash bail statewide, which was temporarily halted hours before it was set to take effect on Jan. 1 due to a court challenge from a coalition of mostly downstate state’s attorneys.

The moves have been cheered and criticized, with Foxx, at times a lightning rod for controversy and nearly always central to conversations around criminal justice over the past nearly seven years.

Throughout her time in office, Foxx has pushed a more nuanced approach to crime. She encouraged prosecutors in her office to read the American Bar Association admonition that their duty is to “seek justice, not merely to convict.” She has encouraged her staff to think about mitigation and rehabilitation and not lose sight of the bigger picture.

Foxx noted that most people who go to prison will reenter society, and called for measures that don’t put them on a path to reoffend.

“This is simple, but we have … lost nuance in all of it,” she said. “So if I see someone who has never had a background … Yeah, can I get the conviction? Sure. Is there something else we can do that is aimed toward not just that? Is this person going to be able to reintegrate into our society? Is this conviction going to create conditions where we see this person again?”

But as a prosecutor, Foxx experienced pushback even from her own staffers, who sometimes disapproved of her approach to the job. In summer 2022, longtime prosecutor Jim Murphy left the office after writing a scathing letter, and walked around the office carrying a shirt that depicted Mickey Mouse showing a middle finger and said “Hey Kim Foxx I’m outta here.”

“It was so much about, ‘ooh, Jim Murphy doesn’t like Kim Foxx.’ But I was wondering when anyone’s going to ask, how I had to console our assistants who saw that happening,” Foxx said, particularly Black women in the office who witnessed it.

Despite conflict with some prosecutors, though, she said she’s seen a shift in attorneys who seek to work at her office because their philosophy aligns with hers.

“There’s a generational shift, I think,” she said, speaking of prosecutors entering the field now. “As a kid from the projects who lived in a bad neighborhood, I heard things that broke my heart. And these were people who were the good guys. And so, I mean, some people left early on, were encouraged to do so.”

‘We have a problem with policing’

Foxx has frequently been blamed by police and city officials for violent crime that rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, though she rejects the premise, pointing out that crime rose in cities across the country during the same time period and that it went down during her first few years in office.

When she took office in late 2016, Foxx said, the city was coming off its most violent year since the 1990s.

“Couldn’t pin 2016 on me, I came in December,” Foxx said. “No one could say that Kim Foxx in 2016 was the reason that we had (more than 760) homicides in the city of Chicago.” Over the next three years, Foxx said, crime continued going down, recording double digit drops until the pandemic changed the national landscape.

“I don’t know where the narrative came from,” Foxx said.

She noted that some of the opposition to her over the years was “just plain racist,” such as a protest organized by the Fraternal Order of Police in front of her office that also drew hate groups.

“The reason I never said it was because the headline would be, ‘Kim Foxx calls the police racist,’ and there would be no nuance, there would be no, I just want to tell the story. Tell the story about John Catanzara,” she said, referring to the controversial FOP president.

Asked about the narrative from police officers that they don’t arrest suspects because Foxx won’t charge them, she called it “s---” and said it’s “appalling.” She said her aunt once had her garage broken into and an officer told her, “Kim Foxx isn’t going to do anything.”

“We have a problem with policing,” she said. “And it’s not a ‘Kim Foxx is against the police.’ It’s we have a whole consent decree that was investigated to determine whether or not the Chicago Police Department was engaging in constitutional policing. And the consent decree was formed because there was a finding that they weren’t.”

She started to face more questions in 2020, Foxx said, when Lightfoot’s choice for police superintendent, David Brown, started blaming her for crime, a narrative she rejects, saying that nonfatal shooting arrest rates “were ridiculously low.”

Foxx said she had a better relationship with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who did not criticize her much publicly aside from the Smollett case.

“There’s a decorum I think that we have to have, because the expectation for the people that we serve, is it we’re the adults in the room?” Foxx said. “And so I will tell you, I was very surprised, again, by the level of decorum that was exercised by the outgoing mayor and the superintendent around these issues.”

Wrongful convictions

In 2013, a federal judge sentenced former Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts to 22 months in prison, taking him to task for betraying communities that looked to him for protection.

Watts and former Officer Kallatt Mohammed were arrested in early 2012 after they were caught stealing drug proceeds with the help of the courier secretly working for the FBI, revealing a scheme in which the officers for years demanded protection payoffs from drug dealers at the former Ida B. Wells public housing development.

Years later, Foxx’s office dropped charges against 15 men who said they were framed by Watts and his crew, then in 2017 believed to be the first mass exoneration in Cook County history.

It was the tip of the iceberg.

By last year, Foxx’s office had agreed to throw out more than 200 convictions connected to Watts and his crew, part of a larger reckoning with convictions tied to disgraced Chicago police officers.

“Someone asked me the other day, ‘Do we think that that era is over?’ I think it takes time and distance for things to be unveiled. I also think it requires you to have a belief in the people who tell the stories,” Foxx said. “The reason Watts was able to do what he did was because these people were drug dealers who lived in Ida B Wells who had no credibility.”

Defense attorneys have at times commended Foxx for dropping charges and other times criticized the office for acting sluggishly. Prosecutors initially filed paperwork to oppose some of the petitions to overturn convictions related to Watts, but later reversed course and dismissed charges for 88 people who had joined together in a mass exoneration effort.

In recent years, the office has dismissed hundreds of cases related to Watts, as well as Jon Burge, who along with his “midnight crew” of detectives is accused of torturing suspects for decades, Reynaldo Guevara, who has been accused of fabricating evidence against people throughout his career with the Chicago Police Department, and others.

Foxx said the office is undertaking “pattern and practice investigations” of officers who frequently come up in litigation to proactively review files.

“I think the scope is far bigger than I can imagine,” she said.

Jussie Smollett

On a cold January morning in 2019, one of the most bizarre and feverishly-covered crimes in Chicago history started to unfold.

Jussie Smollett, then an actor on the television show “Empire” but not yet a household name, reported that he was attacked downtown by two men who yelled racial and homophobic slurs, declared, “This is MAGA country,” hit him and wrapped a noose around his neck.

The story soon fell apart in stunning fashion, and Cook County prosecutors charged him with disorderly conduct for perpetrating a hoax.

Foxx recused herself from the case, putting a deputy in charge, stating that she had spoken to one of Smollett’s relatives. Foxx also asked former CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson to turn over the case to the FBI after Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama, emailed Foxx saying the actor’s family had “concerns about the investigation.”

In another twist, prosecutors dropped all charges against Smollett, pointing to some community service and an agreement that Smollett would forfeit his bond. Smollett was not required to admit to any wrongdoing.

The opaque and informal agreement unleashed a barrage of criticism, resulting in the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the matter.

Special prosecutor Dan Webb refiled charges against Smollett, who was convicted and sentenced to 150 days in jail, though he is appealing. Webb’s investigation found the prosecutor’s office committed “substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures.”

Asked about the Smollett saga, Foxx said she regrets that it overshadowed work her administration was doing.

“They sent people to prison for crimes they didn’t commit,” Foxx said, speaking to wrongful convictions of past administrations. “An actor who perpetrated a crime on himself maybe didn’t get the measure of justice that a segment of society believes he should have got.”

Foxx addressed Smollett during her City Club speech Tuesday, telling the crowd: “My obituary will mention Jussie Smollett, and that makes me mad.”

Looking ahead

Next year, voters will encounter an open seat for Cook County state’s attorney for the first time since 2008 in a race likely animated by many of the same issues dominating the conversation now: violent crime, wrongful convictions and how to address systemic inequities in the criminal justice system.

“I could well imagine that there will be people who will want to play on the fears of communities that are least impacted by crime or less impacted by crime to sell a narrative, around, you know, more prosecution, more police, more punitiveness,” she said. “That absolutely worries me.”

Foxx said she’s concerned about a swing back the other way, adding that “I don’t believe we get a Donald Trump if we didn’t have a Barack Obama.”

But she pointed to her own races as well as Brandon Johnson’s recent victory over Vallas, who ran on a tough on crime platform, as reasons to be optimistic.

“The people that are most impacted by the criminal justice system vote for reform over and over and over again,” she said.

Chicago Tribune’s Hank Sanders contributed.