When our country is home to just 5% of the world’s population but represents 25% of those incarcerated — most of them poor Black and Brown men and women — it is indisputable that the criminal justice system is broken.
Here in Cook County, where an appalling number of wrongful convictions — some based on police torture — have been uncovered, and where rampant courtroom misconduct was revealed decades ago in the federal Operation Greylord investigation, we’re no strangers to injustice and corruption.
Those injustices continue to reverberate in the hallways of the Leighton Criminal Courthouse to this day.
Kim Foxx vowed to chip away at that culture, and she has mostly delivered on those promises since she was elected Cook County’s top prosecutor in 2016. Foxx ousted Anita Alvarez after she lost public trust for waiting more than a year to bring charges against police officer Jason Van Dyke for the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Foxx, who announced Tuesday she will not seek reelection next year, made mistakes. But she clearly moved the needle forward on what voters at the time wanted: criminal justice reform.
When the Illinois Legislature legalized recreational marijuana, it paved the way to expunge thousands of low-level pot convictions — which Foxx did. Her predecessors started overturning wrongful convictions — but Foxx implemented policies and practices to ensure excessive sentencing for low-level misdemeanors and felonies is no longer the norm, and men and women whose cases were mishandled get a fair shake.
Those convicted of crimes must be held accountable. That’s the state’s attorney’s primary job. But true justice is more than that, and whoever succeeds Foxx must keep fairness and reform in mind. The pendulum cannot swing backward.
Foxx, on Tuesday, once again admonished the press for taking her to task for how her office handled Jussie Smollett’s disorderly conduct case, saying it makes her mad her obituary will likely mention the “Empire” actor, who faked a hate crime attack.
Really?
Her critics may have been a bit overzealous, but Foxx has been just as tiresome in defending herself from legitimate concerns about the mishandled Smollett case. After all, Special Prosecutor Dan Webb concluded “substantial abuses of discretion” were carried out when the state’s attorney’s office initially dropped charges against Smollett.
Foxx will have to live in the shadow of the Smollett case. Other legitimate questions have also been raised about how her office has handled more serious felony cases. That’s the complicated legacy Foxx leaves behind.
Her successor just has to keep building on the best of what she accomplished.
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