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The Cook County State’s Attorney Office (CCSAO) is responsible for prosecuting all criminal cases in Cook County. Since Eileen O’Neill Burke was elected as head of the CCSAO, she has made systematic changes to:
1) detain and incarcerate more people,
2) give more power to prosecutors and police,
3) increase her budget.
Prosecutors hold a lot of power at every step of the criminal legal system, from what charges people face to how much time they spend in jail. Though their power is supposed to be constrained to the courtroom, they have more influence over policy than many know.
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With more than 200,000 cases annually, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office is one of the largest prosecutors’ offices in the nation. Their power begins before a case ever reaches a courtroom. It also goes far beyond sentencing and release. Individual prosecutors have a fair amount of discretion, or the ability to make choices, about who gets and stays locked up.
As of 2026, they have 1,543 employees with a total budget of over $260 million. For comparison, the Public Defender’s Office has less than half their staff and budget. That’s not to mention that the prosecutors already have the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office to collect evidence for them.
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Eileen O’Neill Burke’s first 500 days as Cook County State’s Attorney have shown a turn from the previous administration’s belief in reform. Instead, Burke has returned to tough-on-crime prosecution, cloaked with language about justice. She has implemented policies and protocols that change the direction of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.
Burke has fought against police accountability by bypassing checks and balances for gun possession charges, getting rid of public lists of discredited cops, failing to prosecute Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and limiting the cases taken on by the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit.
She has also increased the number of people who are incarcerated pretrial by:
charging more retail theft charges as felonies
requesting detention in more gun possession, domestic violence, and retail theft cases
altering the office’s use of diversion programs
and seeking prison sentences for more gun possession charges.
Finally, she took down a data dashboard published under her predecessor, significantly reducing the transparency of the CCSAO and the Circuit Court of Cook County. Its replacement is almost unusable.
IN THE NEWS
PRETRIAL JAILING has risen by nearly 50% under burke.
Read on to learn about what prosecutors are doing to lock up our neighbors.
Upon taking office, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke implemented policy changes that have led to more people being locked up. Researchers at the Loyola Chicago Center for Criminal Justice concluded that the primary driver of incarceration in Cook County Jail was changes in the rate at which prosecutors request detention in the first 6 months of 2025.
The number of people jailed decreased after implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act, but has steadily risen since State’s Attorney Burke took office. In the first three months of Pretrial Fairness Act implementation, there was a 14% decrease in the number of people jailed while awaiting trial.
In the first six months of 2025, there was a 41% increase in the number of people incarcerated in Cook County Jail, that’s 1,068 more people than at the same time in 2024. Increases in requests for detention are driving increases in pretrial jailing. In the first year without money bond, prosecutors sought detention in 30% cases where people were facing detention eligible charges. By June of 2025, that number increased to 44%.
After Burke took office, there was a 7% increase in the number of detention requests granted by judges. This was due, in-part, to two policies she implemented:
requiring prosecutors to seek detention for almost all categories of gun cases, regardless of the circumstances of the purported offense and arrest and without consideration of the charged person’s social and criminal history
requiring prosecutors to object to every decision to release someone on electronic monitoring if they requested detention, effectively pressuring judges to incarcerate more people in jail.
There has been no rise in crime that would explain this increase in pretrial jailing. In the first three months of 2025, Chicago had the fewest robberies of any quarter in decades. In 2023, murders in Chicago began to decline, and in April 2025 the city had the fewest murders recorded in that month since 1962. As of mid-June, Chicago had a 40% decrease in shootings compared to the same period in 2024.
The increase in pretrial jailing has terrible consequences for families and community safety. In Cook County, felony cases take between one to two years to resolve. People who are jailed while awaiting trial suffer devastating ripple effects on their housing, jobs, education, mental health, and more. These disruptions destabilize our communities and make us all less safe. Pretrial incarceration can make people more likely to be arrested in the future, even when they are not found guilty of the charge.
The increase in pretrial incarceration at Cook County Jail will come at a cost to taxpayers who will be forced to pay the bill for warehousing people who could safely return to the community. Cook County’s years of experience with pretrial reform show that a majority of people awaiting trial will return to court and not be rearrested while awaiting trial.
burke has eliminated multiple forms of police accountability.
Read on to learn about felony review bypass, conviction integrity, and collaboration with ICE.
Burke no longer maintains lists of discredited cops. In the last term, State’s Attorney Foxx maintained a public “Brady list,” which refers to a list of officers who have falsified evidence, and therefore should not be called to testify in trial. Burke no longer maintains this list, meaning that dirty cops who have not been relieved of duty can still be called at trial.
Burke also restricted the size and scope of the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). Cook County has one of the highest wrongful conviction rates in the country. The CIU was established in 2012 to investigate claims of wrongful felony convictions. They hear cases brought by victims of police torture coerced into false confessions.
Not a single person that was wrongfully convicted has been freed from prison since Burke took office. This includes victims of police torture where abuse has been publicly acknowledged by Burke’s predecessor. Burke has no attorneys with defense experience working in the Unit.
Burke has eliminated ways to hold police accountable, including “felony review bypass.” Since the 1970s, the CCSAO has systematically reviewed most felony arrests before filing a felony criminal case. This procedure of requiring prosecutorial review of felony charges is called “felony review.” Felony review serves as an independent check on the police, which is critical in light of the CPD’s rampant misconduct.
In January 2025, the CCSAO started piloting a “Felony Review Bypass Program” in the CPD’s 7th District (Englewood), expanding it to the 5th District (Calumet) in April. In essence, the new policy allows the CPD to directly file the most common felony gun possession charges.
This policy has hurt Black men the most. 88% of the gun possession charges that bypassed felony review in 2025 were filed against Black men. In fact, all but two of the 161 people charged with gun possession through this policy in 2025 were Black or Latine. Young people compose a large proportion of the people charged with felonies through this policy, with people aged 25 years or younger representing 48%.
Burke fails to prosecute federal immigration officers while prosecuting nonviolent protesters. In September 2025, Chicago faced a large-scale deployment of ICE agents, which resulted in thousands of people being jailed at a facility in Broadview, the conditions of which were so abysmal that a federal judge issued orders in November requiring ICE to address them.
Tragically, in the first week of the deployment, an ICE agent fatally shot a Chicago resident during a traffic stop in Franklin Park. Burke did not announce a policy to prosecute ICE agents until months after Operation Midway Blitz began. Burke criticized the Mayor’s executive order for CPD to document ICE misconduct as “overstepping” and released her own protocol for prosecuting use of force by federal agents in February 2026.