Daywatch: Illinois and the future of cash bail

Good morning, Chicago.

Yesterday marked a victory for Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker when the Illinois Supreme Court cleared the way for the state to become the first in the nation to eliminate cash bail for criminal defendants awaiting trial, rejecting arguments from county prosecutors that the law violates the state constitution.

The legal challenges came during a heated campaign season in which GOP challengers to Pritzker and Democratic Attorney General Kwame Raoul unsuccessfully sought to pin the blame for pandemic-era spikes in crime on the SAFE-T Act, even though its most controversial provision, the elimination of cash bail, had yet to take effect.

The 5-2 decision was split along party lines, with the two Republican justices, David Overstreet and Lisa Holder White, dissenting.

“The Illinois Constitution of 1970 does not mandate that monetary bail is the only means to ensure criminal defendants appear for trials or the only means to protect the public,” Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis wrote in the majority opinion.

The justices gave trial courts 60 days to prepare for the new rules, with cash bail to be eliminated Sept. 18.

Read the full story from the Tribune’s Dan Petrella, Jeremy Gorner and Madeline Buckley.

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LeClaire Courts’ long-delayed reconstruction may finally get started

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The CHA tore down LeClaire Courts more than 10 years ago, scattering its last residents across the city, many with Section 8 housing vouchers, and opening a gaping hole along Cicero Avenue in the Garfield Ridge neighborhood near Midway Airport.

Chicago madam sentenced to home confinement in ‘unusual’ federal case

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Jessica Nesbitt, 35, who also goes by the name “Madame Priscilla Belle,” admitted in a plea agreement with prosecutors that she raked in more than $1 million in payments from clients for sexual services over seven years.

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Former Northwestern football player first to open up about alleged hazing

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But his time on the Wildcats was scarred by degrading and sexually abusive hazing, he told the Tribune this week in an exclusive interview. The alleged assaults left him with nightmares and persistent anxiety.

As a freshman quarterback, Yates said, he had to do a quarterback-center exchange — which requires particularly close contact — naked. “He snapped me the football.”

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One of Chicago’s best living writers (and a 2022 inductee of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame), Ana Castillo is often mentioned in the same breath as that other great Chicana writer from Chicago, Sandra Cisneros. She writes haunting fiction on life in Chicago and at the Mexico border, writes Christopher Borrelli. But she’s a better poet. And not too shabby a visual artist. And a good playwright. Also, as an essayist, she’s indispensable on feminism from the perspective of a woman with Chicago and Mexican indigenous roots.

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Gerwig’s “Barbie” doesn’t have that tiring air of trying to be everything to everybody. With luck, and a big opening, it might actually find the audience it deserves just by being its curious, creative, buoyant self.