Stalled Justice: Slow Cook County courts see progress in 2023, but some decade-old cases still linger on dockets
Shawn Jones has spent 12 years jailed without a trial — a “pure hell” that he hopes will end soon with a new judge who has been pushing to give Jones his day in court.
Elsewhere in the massive Cook County court system, Donna Wuchter is losing hope the courts will ever hold a trial for the man accused of killing her friend. She has been waiting for 11 years and counting, enduring a cycle of delays she sums up with one word: “craziness.”
The two cases help sum up the situation in the notoriously slow Cook County courts since the Tribune published its “Stalled Justice” investigation in April: hints of progress but enormous challenges remaining.
The series chronicled how Cook murder cases were taking longer than ever to conclude, and longer than in any other major court system that could be studied. Reporters uncovered multiple chokepoints that were stalling cases long before the pandemic, in a system overseen by judges who allowed cases to languish and court leaders who ignored repeated recommendations for fixes.
Since then, the Tribune has found some signs of improvement. Attorneys say evidence is being shared faster with the help of new technology, more staff members and stricter rules, while judges are questioning delays more aggressively and setting more deadlines to complete pretrial tasks.
But those changes have come in a court system still steeped in bureaucracy, with a history of halfhearted reforms. Researchers have blamed a culture that too often rationalizes delays instead of tackling them, creating a level of dysfunction that Sheriff Tom Dart has said helps fuel “the unending violence in our communities.”
One person who could push serious reform, county Chief Judge Timothy Evans, has downplayed the Tribune series’ findings. In defending the system he’s overseen for two decades, Evans has argued the court has already improved since the worst pandemic-induced delays and that rushing cases could lead to injustice.
Still, Evans this fall pushed judges to better log the reasons for case delays, and his office issued a statement this month saying it has beefed up judicial staffing, technology, research and oversight to ensure “every individual impacted by a crime — especially those impacted by murder — experiences a fair and timely administration of justice.”
Left lingering in Evans’ court system are more than 1,000 pending murder cases, hundreds of which predate the pandemic. Among the oldest are the case of the man accused of killing Wuchter’s friend and the charges against Jones.
Some signs of progress
According to the most recent jail roster, Jones is one of 12 people who have been in custody for more than a decade with pending cases.
Topping the list is Augustin Toscano, accused of being part of a drug and robbery crew blamed for more than a dozen slayings from 2009 to 2011. A judge wants to set a trial date next year. So far, Toscano has been jailed without a trial for 12 years and nine months.
Next is Gene Lewis. He entered jail at age 32, accused of helping kill two men during a Harvey robbery, court records show. Lewis is now 45, with no trial date in sight, as arguments drag on over what’s fair to use as evidence.
Jones is the third-longest held in the jail, awaiting trial on charges he killed two men on the South Side in separate incidents. His cases have also been tied up for years, in part by questions over what evidence can be presented at trial.
The Tribune interviewed Jones as part of its reporting on court delays nearly two years ago, in January 2022. He’d just passed the decade mark in jail and said he was eager to go to trial.
“You just don’t know how it feels to just walk in a courtroom, and hoping you’re going to start trial one day. And you go in and it’s just a continuance, or an excuse of why it’s a continuance,” he said.
In August, he switched from a public defender to a private attorney, David Drwencke, who called the slow progress of Jones’ two cases “mind-blowing.” But the new judge overseeing the cases is picking up the pace, Drwencke said.
And that judge isn’t the only one. Attorneys told the Tribune they are seeing a broader push since the spring to move cases forward.
A Tribune review found judges have been issuing “case management orders” more often in cases filed since the spring. Those orders, recommended by experts for decades, set goals for when tasks should be completed.
Even in older cases lacking those types of orders, attorneys say judges are more aggressively questioning them about delays.
“There was some sunlight put on this and some public pressure, and the Illinois Supreme Court, I think, was embarrassed at what was going on in Cook County,” Drwencke said.
That has put additional pressure on attorneys.
To get up to speed on Jones’ charges, Drwencke said he has at least 100 hours’ worth of evidence to review but expects to meet a February deadline to submit a key filing so the trial can start sometime this spring.
His client said he’s optimistic he’ll finally get a trial after waiting in jail since Barack Obama was campaigning for a second term as president.
“Now I feel a little bit more at ease because my judge is really trying to get things wrapped up,” Jones said from jail in a video interview with him and his attorney.
Hints of such efforts can be seen in the latest data on the jail population, which show a dip in the number of people held at least five years with pending felony cases, from 233 a year ago to 223 in mid-December.
The median time to complete murder cases also has dropped slightly since last year, prosecutors’ data show. For the cases completed from January through August 2023, the most recent information available, at least half took four years and five months to complete, down from four years and eight months for murder cases finished in 2022.
Another way to look at it is how often cases meet time goals set by the county. By that measure, the courts have gotten slightly better.
Cook County wants to finish murder cases within two years of defendants formally being read the charges at arraignments. Last year, just 1 in 10 cases met that mark. Now, it’s 1 in 9.
The statement from Evans’ office said its own analysis of internal court data found that all pending cases in the system — not just murders but all felony and misdemeanor charges — had been reduced significantly since the height of the pandemic, from nearly 41,000 in August 2021 to under 28,000 in late November.
Still, even the rosiest look at the data shows that an enormous backlog remains, in a system that reporters previously documented can get jammed at every turn.
New procedures, ongoing problems
The mound of evidence given to Drwencke for Jones’ cases was gathered as part of a formal process called “discovery,” in which prosecutors must give defense attorneys copies of evidence collected from police, hospitals, cellphone companies and others.
It’s a process that court rules say should take months, yet it often ends up taking years. But several recent changes could speed up that process.
In May, the state’s attorney’s office unveiled a new, long-planned data system meant to smooth the exchange of evidence. The office said it’s also added 11 more paralegals since the spring to do more of the time-consuming back-office work that previously had burdened prosecutors, allowing them to focus on trying cases.
“That will also help with us turning over discovery and making sure that we are meeting deadlines for those case management orders,” said Risa Lanier, second in command at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Another change that could limit delays comes, indirectly, from the historic overhaul of the bail system that went into effect in mid-September. Now, if prosecutors want a judge to jail a defendant until trial, they must swiftly give the defense any evidence they want to present in that early-stage hearing.
“I think that will speed the cases up exponentially,” said Julie Koehler, who heads the public defender’s homicide task force. “It’s what should have been going on all along.”
Still, these changes leave other problems unaddressed, such as the protracted arguments over what evidence is fair to show a jury.
Case management orders, with their specific deadlines, can help speed up that process. But attorneys noted the orders alone can’t magically fix the logjams created when interrelated bureaucracies fail to work together to get things done.
And although more judges are issuing the orders, the Tribune found that many still aren’t, particularly in suburban courthouses that can get just as backlogged, if not more, than the main courthouse in Little Village.
Beyond that, there is no data yet to show how much, if at all, any particular reform has limited specific types of delays.
Court leaders this fall launched a long-promised effort to log the reasons for case delays in court dockets, but the Tribune found many dockets still lack proper entries. Judges and clerks say they’re still ironing out how to make the process work.
“This is a significant change and a new system for entering this information, and both judges and clerks are adapting to the use of codes for the reasons for continuances,” according to a statement issued by the chief judge’s office.
Meanwhile, what the court sees as significant progress can be of little consolation to people like Wuchter.
‘Still right where we started’
After Gena Chiodo went missing in fall of 2012, Wuchter and other friends spent many days combing the woods in hopes of locating her. Eventually, hunters found the body of the Calumet City woman across the state line in Indiana, about 25 miles to the south.
In the 11 years since, the friends have often gathered in courtroom pews, waiting to see what would happen to the man accused of Chiodo’s murder: her live-in boyfriend, Donol Clark.
Early in the case, at Clark’s bond hearing, prosecutors laid out a slew of evidence they said police had gathered even before Chiodo’s body was discovered, from blood spattered throughout the couple’s home to a bloody negligee, a bloody shower curtain and a bathroom smelling of bleach.
Then the pace of the case slowed dramatically at the Markham courthouse. The Tribune’s investigation found the south suburban courthouse to be the slowest of any that handles murder cases in Cook County; the median time to finish murder cases there had climbed by 2022 to nearly seven years.
Every month or two, Chiodo’s friends would pack Clark’s latest court hearing in matching purple T-shirts bearing Chiodo’s name. They watched as brief hearings took only the tiniest steps forward, with issue after issue bogging down the case. Weeks turned into months and months into years, as their hopes for swift justice receded.
“It was, ‘Hopefully next year,’ or, you know, ‘It should happen soon,’ and it never came to pass. Something else would happen,” Wuchter recalled.
The case almost went to trial about five years ago, but then the pathologist who did Chiodo’s autopsy got fired for incompetence, spurring years of arguments over what a jury could be told about that while attorneys waited to see if state regulators would discipline the pathologist. (They didn’t.)
It was close to going to trial this year too.
In June 2023, Clark — now 53, and with graying temples — sat at a table in a gray jumpsuit, while Wuchter and Chiodo’s other friends sat on courthouse benches to hear something that hadn’t occurred in the case’s 90-plus previous hearings: A judge set a trial date.
The trial was supposed to take place in the fall, but then came another delay. The day of the trial, the lead prosecutor told the judge that her new colleague on the case just had hip surgery and needed more time to prepare.
And a crime scene investigator was on paternity leave.
And prosecutors were still trying to get the original pathologist to testify.
And prosecutors were filing a new motion to argue over evidence.
Clark’s attorneys responded in court that they were ready for trial. They questioned why prosecutors waited so long to file a new argument over the evidence and said the motion could have been filed years ago.
Still, the trial was postponed.
At a hearing the next month, Circuit Judge Carl Boyd gave the defense another month to file a written response to prosecutors’ latest arguments. At a hearing in late November, Boyd told both sides to come back in two months — on Jan. 22 — to formally argue in court over the arguments submitted on paper.
Neither the prosecution nor defense would comment on the case for this story. For now, no new trial date has been set.
Boyd has told attorneys he was “very interested” in completing the case “expeditiously.” His clerk has begun inputting the formal reasons for delays, as part of the new process to better track them.
None of it impresses Wuchter.
“We’re still right where we started, it seems like. It’s just — nothing,” she said, adding that Chiodo’s other friends also feel the frustration. “All you can tell people is: ‘Hang in there and don’t quit.’”