Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has directed prosecutors to seek prison sentences in every felony case involving machine gun-type weapons, according to a new policy circulated to staff on Thursday.
The order is the latest move by the new prosecutor as she seeks to forge a tougher stance on gun crimes per campaign promises and after condemning the city’s gun violence in December when she was ceremonially sworn into office.
According to the policy, prosecutors on their own cannot enter into a plea agreement for a probation term or other punishments that do not involve prison time in cases where the defendant used or possessed “any machine gun conversion device, extended magazine, drum magazine, automatic switch, as well as a privately made firearm, ghost gun and/or defaced firearm.”
Assistant state’s attorneys can seek permission from a supervisor if they believe the policy should be modified in individual cases, but officials said supervisors would likely only waive the terms in specific circumstances.
“Obviously our grave concern here is that if you are a person who is possessing one of these weapons and you choose to fire it, you’re not only putting one person at risk, you’re putting an entire block, an entire neighborhood, and entire community at risk because these weapons spray like machine guns,” said Yvette Loizon, chief of policy at the state’s attorney’s office.
Loizon acknowledged that the new policy may lead to felony cases lingering longer on the docket, with more of them going to trial.
“While it might be more expedient to plead those cases down and get them off the docket, it’s our position that the seriousness of these offenses should be commensurate with the way we treat them,” she said. “If that means we have to put more effort into these cases and take them to trial … that’s a time commitment we are most certainly willing to make.”
In a statement, O’Neill Burke said the policy is meant to provide “certainty and consistency for prosecutors and police.”
“ Anyone who has seen one of these modified firearms in action understands that these are weapons of war that have no place in our communities,” she said.
According to ATF data provided to the Tribune by the state’s attorney’s office, recoveries of weapons with machine gun conversion devices have increased significantly in Chicago since 2019, with 40 recovered that year. In 2023, authorities recovered 564 such weapons and 604 in 2024, according to the data.
The directive echoes the office’s new detention policy, which says that prosecutors must automatically ask judges to order defendants held in jail while awaiting trial if they are charged with certain offenses, including use or possession of these types of guns.
Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling lauded the move in a statement, saying that the “proliferation of illegally modified firearms has created too much trauma in our city for far too long.”
Though shootings have fallen in recent years since spiking during the COVID-19 pandemic, how to address the city’s gun violence is a consistent theme of city and state politics, with often conflicting viewpoints on the best methods of curbing the problem as well as balancing it with measures to rectify historical harm done by the criminal justice system.
O’Neill Burke’s predecessor, Kim Foxx, was elected in 2016 amid calls for reform in the wake of the slaying of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke, with her early years in office marked by efforts such as raising the threshold at which prosecutors would charge retail theft offenses as felonies.
City and state officials have also grappled in recent years with how to fix systemic inequities in the criminal justice system. Last year, the state became the first to legislatively outlaw cash bail with a measure that instead tasks judges with making detention decisions based on risk to the community, rather than money.
