By BETH HUNDSDORFER
& HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
Illinois’ “no cash bail” law, the only one of its kind in the United States, went into effect Monday. In courtrooms around the state, judges conducted the first hearings under the new system that determines whether a defendant will be jailed while awaiting trial based on dangerousness and risk of fleeing prosecution, rather than their ability to post bail.
The abolition of cash bail was included in the SAFE-T Act criminal justice reform of 2021 and originally slated to take effect Jan. 1, though court challenges delayed its implementation until Monday.
In St. Clair County Circuit Court, where nearly 2,000 felony cases and more than 3,400 misdemeanors are filed annually, at least one person was released from jail to await trial on the second day the SAFE-T Act’s bail reform provisions were in effect.
A woman accused of aggravated domestic battery for hitting her partner with a piece of wood was released on Tuesday morning. A mother of a newborn, she was released after a detention hearing found she was not a flight risk or a threat to the public or a specific person.
St. Clair County held three detention hearings Monday morning. All three were previously held on cash bail in cases filed before the SAFE-T Act went into effect. The new law entitled defendants held in lieu of bail prior to Monday’s effective date to petition to have their cases moved to the new system.
Two of those defendants stand accused of first-degree murder and another was being held on firearms charges. The hearings resembled detention hearings held in federal court – which has not used cash bail as a detention method since 1984 – with testimony focusing on whether the person is a flight risk or a danger to the public or a specific person.
“We are all going to make some interesting law this morning,” St. Clair County Judge John O’Gara said as he began the first hearing in his courtroom on Monday morning.
In a basement courtroom in the Kane County Judicial Center — the county’s St. Charles-based criminal courthouse — six defendants were called before Judge Salvatore LoPiccolo for initial appearance hearings Monday morning.
Bond hearings have historically been quick affairs, often with no defense attorneys present for indigent defendants who wouldn’t get assigned a public defender until later in their case. But detention hearings in Kane County on Monday afternoon took about 15 minutes each. Both the state’s attorney and the public defender assigned to handle this week’s hearings laid out their cases for whether the defendant should continue to be held in Kane County Jail or released.
Of the six, all but one of whom had been arrested since Kane County’s last-ever bond call ended around noon on Sunday, four were released after their initial conditions hearing. Two remained in custody until the afternoon detention hearings, at which prosecutors asked the judge to keep them in jail.
All parties and the judge also had access to the defendants’ criminal history, a practice that isn’t new in either Kane or St. Clair county courts, but is a novel development in many counties that have been working with the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services, which has been staffing up to compile those reports for the better part of a year.
RELEASE FOR VIOLATION OF ORDER OF PROTECTION: In Kane County, the two detention hearings were for violation of an order of protection and domestic violence charges – two areas where the SAFE-T Act sought to give judges greater authority to detain individuals if requested by the state’s attorney’s office.
Standing in an orange Kane County Jail uniform in the windowless courtroom, Tudor Marcel Stoica was read the charges against him after having been arrested the night before for allegedly violating an order of protection from his 80-year-old next door neighbor. Assistant State’s Attorney Christine Bayer pointed to Stoica’s history of breaking that stalking/no-contact order, resulting in a few other pending cases against him.
Stoica was out on bond twice for those previous violations.
“He poses a danger and a threat to our victim in his case,” Bayer told the judge. “Based on that, we’d ask that he’d be detained.”
In response, the public defender listed mitigating factors, like the fact that Stoica has full custody of his 11-year-old son and that he’s studying engineering at Northern Illinois University. In a prior life, Stoica was a physician — a “laparoscopic hernia repair specialist,” he reminded the public defender.
After a bit more back-and-forth, Judge LoPiccolo ruled that the state hadn’t shown “clear and convincing evidence that he poses a real and present physical threat to his neighbor,” given that their verbal altercation on Sunday night didn’t include any physical threats of violence.
Afterward, Bayer asked that the judge order an alcohol-related condition on Stoica’s release, as the police report had indicated Stoica had “an odor of alcohol” when he was arrested. LoPiccolo agreed.
“I will order that you’re not to consume alcoholic beverages and I’ll take it one step further,” he said. “I will order that you submit to random alcohol testing through pretrial services as well.”
The random alcohol testing order is an example of a condition Kane County Chief Judge Clint Hull said in an interview last week he expected to see less frequently under the SAFE-T Act, given the law’s mandate that defendants be placed under the least-restrictive conditions necessary while still ensuring they show up to court.
While Hull said he’s heard concerns from law enforcement predicting fewer opportunities to reach those who may need drug or alcohol treatment, he said he understands one of the SAFE-T Act’s many goals is to limit judges giving “conditions just for conditions’ sake.”
“This is the biggest criminal justice change since the code was written in 1963, so there’s a lot of things that we don’t know,” Hull said. “But I don’t look at that as a negative. We’re just gonna have to see what happens and I have complete confidence in the court system … if we have to adapt, we will adapt under the confines of the law.”
DETENTION FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: The second Kane County detention hearing on Monday ended in continued detention of a man accused of a pair of Class A misdemeanor domestic battery charges — one of the so-called “detainable offenses” laid out under the new law, and the type of case Hull predicted would be the most common to appear in detention hearings.
In the charging documents, Adrian Jowers denied he put his girlfriend in a headlock during an argument over a Link card. In court on Monday, Jowers stood as his criminal history was read, including a battery charge for allegedly punching a person on the street, and a Kendall County charge for reckless discharge of a firearm.
The public defender responded that Jowers’ previous criminal history had no bearing on the domestic violence charge that brought Jowers to court on Monday and asked the judge to release him so he’d be able to continue looking for work and helping provide for his two children, with whom he doesn’t live.
However, LoPiccolo said he was relying on Jowers’ criminal history to make the determination “that no conditions or combinations of conditions can mitigate” Jowers’ threat to public safety, especially to an identifiable victim, and ordered he be held in Kane County Jail. He’ll appear in court again next week.
