As a media scrum gathered last week on the first floor of the Leighton Criminal Court Building after a detention hearing for a suspect in the high-profile Hadiya Pendleton case, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke made an appearance joining the prosecutor on the case to talk about the hearing’s outcome.
Though her administrative offices are in the Loop, O’Neill Burke said she often works at the busy main courthouse on the city’s Southwest Side a few days a week.
“There’s an energy to this building,” she said. “You walk in and you can feel the buzz.”
After several months in office, the new top prosecutor is forging her routines, making some moves typical of new administrations, such as increasing visibility at local courthouses and reorganizing some of the office’s structures.
But as she stepped into her role, she also quickly set a different tone, calling Chicago’s gun violence problem “war zone numbers” and pledging in her swearing-in speech to take a hard stance on guns.
She’s implemented new policies around guns and pretrial detention that were cheered by officials such as Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling but criticized by others who said the changes move the city backward toward bygone eras of mass incarceration that contributed to an inequitable justice system.
With her first 100 days in office behind her, O’Neill Burke gave one of the first one-on-one interviews since she was ceremonially sworn in Dec. 2.
She reflected on her recent policy moves, the nitty-gritty details of running the second-largest prosecutor’s office in the country and raised concerns about impending changes to the county’s electronic monitoring programs.
“There’s always going to be people who don’t like this policy or don’t like that policy, but I ran on my belief that the guns are … disrupting an entire community,” O’Neill Burke told the Tribune in an interview in her office at the 26th Street courthouse.
Last year, the former appellate judge narrowly defeated her Democratic primary opponent, Clayton Harris III, and then Republican Bob Fioretti by a wider margin in the general election.
Her predecessor, Kim Foxx, was elected with a mandate for reform in the wake of the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by then-Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke. Foxx was part of a cohort of so-called progressive prosecutors, and her time in office was in part marked by initiatives such as mass marijuana expungements and raising the threshold at which the office would charge retail theft as a felony.
In contrast, O’Neill Burke’s early policy announcements have been more typical of a tough-on-crime approach, pledging to automatically seek pretrial detention for certain offenses and directing prosecutors to seek prison sentences in every felony case involving machine gun-type weapons. She has also revoked Foxx’s retail theft policy, enabling prosecutors to charge as felonies retail theft cases at the legal threshold of $300.
Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell called her machine gun policy a “mass injustice.” And advocates for Illinois’ cash bail reform criticized her detention policy, saying that it does not “allow for individual decision-making and evaluation of each specific case.”
She shrugged off the critiques.
“In every single case, two people walk out of a courtroom and one thinks you’re an idiot and one thinks you’re brilliant,” she said. “You’ve got to be OK with that.”
Her office’s handling of potential wrongful convictions has also led to friction in courtrooms.
In one recent post-conviction case, defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean blasted the office for how it opposed vacating a murder conviction in a case linked to disgraced Chicago police Detective Reynaldo Guevara.
“The state’s attorney wants to signal that there’s a new sheriff in town. This isn’t the way to do it,” Bonjean said.
Judge Carol Howard ultimately did reverse the conviction for Tyrece Williams, whose case became the 50th murder conviction linked to Guevara to be overturned.
Asked whether she has a different approach to potential wrongful convictions, O’Neill Burke said no, pointing out that the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit remains in place.
“That is a vital unit,” she said.
However, O’Neill Burke said the office’s position on issuing certificates of innocence has shifted. Such certificates are often pursued after a conviction has been vacated and as a precursor to a lawsuit.
She said she views certificates of innocence as appropriate in cases where there is “concrete, irrefutable evidence” that the individual is innocent, such as a DNA exoneration.
“There’s a lot of daylight between ‘We can’t prove the case again’ and ‘You’re innocent,’” she said. “There is a significant difference in that.”
O’Neill Burke also took office just as the county was making a long-discussed change to merge separate electronic monitoring programs, unifying them under the auspices of the chief judge’s office, rather than the Cook County sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office will stop accepting new defendants April 1.
In a statement, the sheriff’s office said it “has been working in close collaboration with the Office of the Chief Judge and other stakeholders and is on track to stop accepting new placements to our EM program as of April 1.”
O’Neill Burke raised some concerns similar to those raised by county commissioners in a March 11 criminal justice committee hearing, such as enforcement of violations when the court’s pretrial services staff do not have the arrest powers of deputies and how quickly Timothy Evans’ office will be fully staffed to handle the change.
Evans’ office has said it needs up to 153 additional employees to run the program. The office has proposed a plan to gradually onboard new hires through May 2026.
“So not only do you not have the personnel that are needed in order to enforce electronic monitoring because they don’t have the criterion of being law enforcement personnel, but you don’t have any personnel that can handle the influx of cases right now,” she said. “So I have some significant concerns.”
Like many new administrations, O’Neill Burke has also tinkered with the office’s structure with the goal of spreading out the experience and talent of top-level prosecutors, some of whom were siloed under a previous setup, she said.
“All of our experience and all of our talent in the office … was all in this one unit, and when they went to try cases, they would just try cases with each other,” she said. “At the same time, we had massive attrition happening in the trial division and they were getting just pummeled with cases so we knew that structure wasn’t working anymore for a bunch of different reasons.”
This allows the most experienced prosecutors to serve as mentors and trainers for younger assistant state’s attorneys, she said.
The office is also building up its public corruption unit, anticipating going after bigger fish in light of the Trump administration’s stance on corruption cases.
“I think we can all acknowledge the federal government is not going to be going after public corruption in the next few years,” she said. “We need to be ready to fill that void.”
She also noted the large numbers of people leaving federal employment, which could be a boon for the office.
“We’re a good house for people to come to,” she said.
Chicago Tribune’s A.D. Quig contributed.
