Daywatch: Appeals skyrocket as courts grapple with bond reform
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Good morning, Chicago.
In October in Livingston County, Judge Jennifer Bauknecht issued a lengthy decision following a detention hearing just weeks after cash bail was abolished across the state.
“All right. Since its founding, this country has used monetary bonds in conjunction with pretrial conditions as an effective tool for ensuring that a defendant is not a risk of harm to others in the community, does not commit any criminal offenses while out on bond, and that he appears as directed at all future court dates,” Bauknecht began.
She told the defendant, charged with soliciting a child, that prior to the Pretrial Fairness Act, the landmark legislation that took effect in September, she would have “given the defendant a reasonable monetary bond,” according to an appeals court decision. But without that discretion, she said, she ordered him detained.
An Illinois appeals court vacated her decision, finding that the court “improperly focused on its ‘disdain’ for the recent statutory changes.”
The pretrial appeal of Bauknecht’s decision is among hundreds filed since the legislation took effect. The opinions offer glimpses at how the new legislation is playing out across the state and clarify untested portions of the statute, but the appeals have come in such a volume that the state’s highest court has convened a task force to examine what it called a “dramatic increase” in the number of cases sent to appellate courts.
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Madeline Buckley.
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