Crime & Law

Cook County State’s Attorney Will No Longer Divert Nonviolent Gun Cases to Restorative Justice Courts

Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has instructed her office to stop diverting people with gun possession charges to the county’s Restorative Justice Community Courts (RJCC), which reroute people with nonviolent charges from criminal courts to an alternative program.

The move guts the RJCC caseload, 82.8% of which was dedicated to adjudicating gun possession cases, according to the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. Already the caseload has been cut in half, according to Judge Patricia Spratt, who presides over the North Lawndale RJCC.

Those who advocate for the restorative justice model say reducing the types of cases that are referred would cut back on the rehabilitation opportunities the courts afford to eligible young people. The State’s Attorney’s Office, which now has a new leader, says they prefer alternative approaches that move away from the peace circle model utilized by RJCC and instead toward gun education and a path toward Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) cards.

Upon completion of the RJCC program, a charge would be dismissed and arrest and court records expunged. Without the option of the RJCC, people will be charged with a felony and “they may be incarcerated, they may be released on conditions,” Spratt said.

“(The RJCC) works. It saves lives, and they come out of the court being rehabilitated into the community, and they’re no longer viewed as a threat to the people in the community,” Spratt said. “I think that’s a boon to each of these communities, so I feel badly that that’s what’s happened.”

The State’s Attorney’s Office said it doesn’t agree with the peace circle model for gun possession cases used at the RJCC because it is intended for cases involving victims and most gun possession cases do not involve one, said Yvette Loizon, chief of policy for the Cook County state’s attorney.

But proponents of the RJCC said the program works as it is, both in providing resources to people and lowering recidivism. Participants have a recidivism rate of 13% within one year of enrollment, compared to 65% of similarly situated young people whose gun possession cases are adjudicated in traditional court proceedings, according to the Chief Judge’s Office.

The RJCC started in 2017 as an alternative take to justice: repairing harm, building empathy and restoring community relationships, as opposed to criminalization. Inside four courtrooms in Avondale, North Lawndale, Englewood and suburban Sauk Village, a person charged must accept the responsibility for the harm they caused and participate in a peace circle to create a “Repair of Harm Agreement.” That agreement could include community service, job training, counseling, paying for damages or restitution with victims. The goal is to complete this process within six to 18 months. Those eligible must be 18-26 years old, have been charged with a non-violent felony or misdemeanor and have a non-violent criminal history.

Loizon said another issue is that the RJCC does not set up people for FOID cards — “They walk out of that diversion program still in the position they were in when they got into it,” she said.

However, those coming into the RJCC usually already have FOID cards — their offense instead is a first-time gun possession case attended to another charge, Spratt said. For example, she explained, someone would get pulled over for a traffic stop, an officer finds a gun and the person doesn’t have a concealed carry license.

Instead of using the RJCC for these cases, O’Neill Burke, alongside two Illinois legislators, introduced bills that would send a person arrested on gun possession charges to a gun crime diversion program. After they complete that program, they can apply for an FOID card. This would apply to non-violent, first-time offenders charged with a Class 4 felony, the lowest class for felony charges for weapons and does not include automatic weapons.

“It doesn’t mean that once the legislation gets passed that we aren’t willing to refer cases to the RJCCs, if the program is modified so that it supports the intent of the legislation and moves away from that peace circle model and towards a model which will prepare individuals who go into our RJCCs for getting some gun education,” Loizon said.

But Spratt said the removal of peace circles, which bring together the person charged, the person harmed and community members in a confidential conversation, would destroy the restorative justice process.

“I would suggest that before the state’s attorney decides to take peace circles out of the mix, that she gets some (restorative justice) training to understand how important the peace circles are,” Spratt said.

Passing legislation takes time — and the State’s Attorney’s Office has already stopped sending these gun possession cases to the RJCC. When asked what will happen to those who will now go to criminal courts instead of being routed to the RJCC, Loizon said “it’s a very small population of people” as the RJCC only serves the four communities where the courts are located. She noted that in the legislation the office is proposing, the diversion program would cover the entire state.

“I think that the people who may have otherwise been diverted into a specific RJCC are truly in no worse position with the decision that gun cases don’t go into the RJCCs at this time because there are other options available to them, and those are the same options that are available to people in Cook County who otherwise do not live in a community that has access to an RJCC,” Loizon said.

Loizon said there are other diversion opportunities, like the First Time Weapon Offender Program, which results in the elimination of charges for those who complete the program.

Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr. said while he appreciates that the State’s Attorney’s Office is looking at “new solutions,” he’s worried about what will happen in this gap period between now and the possible passage of the bills. He said there’s pressure on attorneys not to be lenient on possession cases and he’s worried they will be hesitant to use the program because of that.

“They’re pointing to the (First Time Weapon Offender Program) as an option,” Mitchell said. “They’re completely right. But, you know, I worry about the success of that program. I worry about the ability of people to use that program. Will they use that program, kind of, given the current environment that we’re in?”

Loizon said the office is evaluating other cases “that actually involve a victim and therefore are appropriate for the peace circle model.” One of those is retail theft. Once O’Neill Burke took office, she lowered the threshold to make retail theft a felony crime to $300. Her predecessor, Kim Foxx, put it at a $1,000 threshold.

According to the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, there were 443 participants in the RJCC from 2021-2023. Gun possession took up the bulk of the charges at 82.8%. Property charges made up 5.19%, and narcotics possession accounted for 4.06%.

With this system in place, participants are able to “continue with life, access education, access work, without having this on their record,” said Naomi Johnson, co-executive director of the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts.

Without the system, Johnson is concerned about an increase in incarceration that could exacerbate underlying issues that lead to gun violence: poverty and a lack of support and resources for communities.

“Taking away opportunities for diversion ultimately amounts to focusing on a strategy of criminalization, which we know is not effective,” Johnson said. “We know from the lessons we’ve learned from the War on Drugs, it only continues to tear apart communities.”

This increased criminalization of gun possession amounts to a war on guns, Johnson said, paralleling the War on Drugs campaign. It similarly has devastated Black and Brown communities through hyper-policing, hyper-criminalization and prosecution of non-violent acts, she added. In Cook County, Black and Latino people account for 96% of the gun deaths since 2017 and 97% of felony cases, convictions and incarcerations for gun possession since 2011, according to a recent report from the center.

---