Cook County state's attorney race down to the wire

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There are two speeds in the American criminal justice system: too fast and too slow, and society lurches from one to another.

Too-fast justice fills the jails and wastes law enforcement resources pursuing petty criminals. Too slow lets the small fish escape to become big fish and leaves law-abiding citizens feeling unprotected against the lash of crime.

The public doesn’t like either for very long. Which puts the Cook County state’s attorney — the elected official responsible for 700 lawyers prosecuting crimes among a population greater than Ireland’s — in a bind.

The public — the estimated 20% who voted anyway — made their choice in the Democratic primary Tuesday, leaning toward tough-talking former Judge Eileen O’Neill Burke, playing for Team Too Fast, over Clayton Harris III, representing the too-slow faction, with half the votes counted.

If elected, Burke would be a pivot away from current two-term State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, protege of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who put the brakes on prosecutions, tossing out thousands of cases, declaring the system “inequitable, unfair and totally unjust” and pushing to be more fair ... to accused criminals.

Theft of items worth more than $300 could be handled as a felony, but she more than tripled that threshold to $1,000 which, combined with the post-COVID-19 hollowing out of downtown, and the George Floyd riots, created a sense of a Loop awash in unchecked crime.

That might have been forgiven. But Foxx kneecapped herself in the case of Jussie Smollett, the obscure actor who, in an apparent bid for notoriety, beat himself up in 2019. Foxx botched the prosecution of the case, then botched her handling of the botch.

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Cook County state's attorney race down to the wire

Democrats appear to be leaning toward taking a tough-on-crime approach.

By Neil Steinberg

 

Foxx decided not to run for reelection. Preckwinkle ordered up Foxx 2.0 in the form of Harris, who had received the official backing of the Cook County Democratic Party.

A college lecturer and serial functionary who has been everything from Lyft’s director of government affairs to general counsel at the Illinois Department of Transportation, Harris was the last chief of staff of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

He spent more than four years as the executive director of the Port of Chicago, the city’s underutilized bulk shipping gateway, where Harris presided over abandoned freighters, crumbling concrete docks and piles of gravel (and where, I should mention, I spent the day with him in 2017 exploring his domain).

Harris’ last criminal work was more than 20 years ago, when he was an assistant state’s attorney. Like Foxx, he worried about prosecuting crime too hard.

“If someone came and took my cellphone, is that cellphone worth a felony on your record? I do not think so,” he said.

Burke disagreed. A former criminal defense lawyer, judge and appellate court justice, her put-criminals-in-jail approach made her the darling of deep-pocketed donors, who bankrolled her to the tune of $3.1 million, nearly triple what Harris collected.

Burke found herself in the delicate position of being supported by rich Republicans such as investment stars at Citadel, the fund run by billionaire Ken Griffin, whose view of crime in Chicago prompted him to go live in Florida.

Burke said that if she were elected, she would respect the state felony cutoff of $300, the price of a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses.

The winner will go on to certainly defeat perennial candidate and born-again Republican Bob Fioretti,, the former alderperson whose ward was redrawn from under him after the 2010 census. He has since run for five local offices and failed every time. Maybe the sixth time will be the charm. Maybe not.