After fatal police shootings and other deaths at the hands of law enforcement in Illinois, investigating agencies are required to “publicly release a report” if no charges are brought against the officers.
However, two Metro East prosecutors have proved to be reluctant participants in that process, giving up what should be public documents only after records requests and maintaining that they are following the law by doing so.
The reporting requirement was instituted as part of a broad police reform package passed in 2015 in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson. The package included new mandates and regulations around chokeholds, stop-and-frisk and body-worn cameras, the latter of which commanded the most attention at the time.
Around the time of its passage, news outlets noted that many police killings or in-custody deaths were not publicly reported. Tucked into the 174-page law is a key provision intended to dictate how law enforcement and prosecuting agencies communicate to the public when police kill residents.
The provision states: “If the State's Attorney, or a designated special prosecutor, determines there is no basis to prosecute the law enforcement officer involved in the officer-involved death, or if the law enforcement officer is not otherwise charged or indicted, the investigators shall publicly release a report.”
But regardless of intent, experts say vague wording in that single paragraph has resulted in a patchwork system across the state, leaving transparency to the discretion of local officials.
In most of Illinois’ largest counties — including Cook, DuPage, Lake, Kane, McHenry, Winnebago, Champaign, Sangamon, Peoria, McLean, Rock Island and Kendall — prosecutors generally seem to comply with the law, releasing reports when they decide not to charge an officer.
In fact, of the 15 largest counties in Illinois, just three elected prosecutors appear to fail to meet this requirement: Madison County State’s Attorney Thomas Haine and St. Clair County State’s Attorney James Gomric in the Metro East, and Will County State’s Attorney Jim Glasgow in northeast Illinois.
There have been at least 16 fatal police shootings or other deaths in Madison County and at least 12 in St. Clair County since 2019. Both counties fail to publish any findings on their websites or through any other channels, which some experts said violates the law, though both agencies released some records upon request from Invisible Institute.
The Madison County state’s attorney’s office provided its policy for investigating homicides and “questionable deaths” and released hundreds of pages of findings letters for police shootings and in-custody deaths since 2019. It does not appear that any of the decisions had been previously published; the policy, which was last revised in August 2023, only briefly touches on deaths at the hands of law enforcement and does not discuss any agency’s role in publishing investigative results in those cases.
By contrast, the St. Clair County state’s attorney’s office said it had no written policy for police killings or in-custody deaths, and it initially claimed it did not have any decisions in any such cases since 2019, when State’s Attorney James Gomric was first appointed to replace Brendan Kelly, who was named director of the Illinois State Police by Gov. JB Pritzker.
After further requests and appeals by Invisible Institute, the office of Attorney General Kwame Raoul ordered the county to turn over responsive records, but that process is ongoing. The released records include 33 pages detailing findings about police shootings — fatal and nonfatal — and some other police-involved deaths, but other sources show cases that have not yet been turned over.
In both cases, the state’s attorney’s offices’ failures to publish their findings in these cases violates the 2015 state law, experts said. “It’s my understanding that if you are required to do a FOIA request to receive the information, it has not been publicly released,” said Loren Jones of the Chicago nonprofit Impact for Equity. “It's a public document, but it's not publicly available.”
Both the St. Clair and Madison County prosecutor's office interpret the law differently. Spokesmen for both offices said that they maintain their charging decisions and that they will make them available upon request.
“Some members of the public still request additional information from our office on such cases, and we freely release our reports to anyone who wishes to review them — as evidenced by our recent release of hundreds of pages of such reports at the request of this very news organization,” Brian Brueggemann, the office’s communications director, wrote in an email.
Because no agency officially tracks all police shootings or other deaths at the hands of officers in Illinois, reporters consulted with several sources to identify cases, particularly in St. Clair County: local news reports, the SPOTLITE database of police lethal force maintained by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a dashboard maintained by the Illinois State Police, which is limited to cases involving ISP troopers or when local agencies call on the ISP to investigate.
Madison, St. Clair and Will counties not posting the reports publicly leaves the public in the dark, said Marie Franklin, an East St. Louis community organizer who ran for mayor in 2023.
“I really feel disappointed that we would be one of the counties that is not being forthcoming with these reports,” said Franklin, a St. Clair County resident. “They are particularly helpful in understanding what's going on in our community and how we are being affected by the criminal justice system.”
Disparities in public reporting of police-related deaths in Illinois
Several of the cases in Madison County led to legal claims being filed against local law enforcement agencies. Despite significant payouts to the families of local residents who died at the hands of law enforcement, the state’s attorney’s office never published its findings.
In one of those cases, the family of 28-year-old Elissa Lindhorst filed a federal lawsuit against Madison County after she went into opioid withdrawal and later died at the Madison County Jail in February 2020. The family alleged that jail staff ignored Lindhorst and other detainees’ pleas to provide her with medical attention over the course of four days while her health deteriorated.
Lindhorst had been arrested after appearing in Granite City Municipal Court, where a judge recognized her from an outstanding warrant from the Hartford Police Department for possession of a controlled substance, the Alton Telegraph reported.
In court filings, Lindhorst’s mother alleged that deputies and sergeants with the Madison County Sheriff’s Office knowingly failed to provide Lindhorst with medical attention, falsely wrote in reports that she told them she was “okay” and threw away a handwritten note from her fellow detainees about her condition. In their response, attorneys for the county denied that any jail employees had violated the law but admitted that the note had been found in the trash.
The lawsuit eventually led to a $3 million settlement approved by the Madison County Board in 2023. But by that time, Madison County State’s Attorney Thomas Haine had already issued his official finding in the case two years prior.
In a two-page letter addressed to an Illinois State Police investigator, a prosecutor with his office wrote that “Staff at the Madison County Jail were consistently and routinely observing” Lindhorst and that “Steps were taken to get medical assistance or special housing for her during her withdrawal.”
In declining to file charges against the deputies involved, First Assistant State’s Attorney Chad Loughrey found that “Jail deputies acted appropriately and consistently with their policies and procedures.” But two years later, the settlement required the jail to update their training on addressing opioid withdrawal.
In St. Clair County, after Invisible Institute asked for the same records, the state’s attorney’s office initially said there were no responsive documents. In a follow-up request about a particular case from 2021 — the death of Diwone Wallace while in custody of the Centreville Police Department — the office denied the request, claiming it fell under protections for “deliberative” documents. When an appeal was filed with the attorney general’s office, the state’s attorney’s office provided a one-page letter clearing officers.
Upon a new appeal being filed for additional cases that, like Wallace’s, should have come up during the original search, the Illinois attorney general’s public access counselor issued what’s known as a “binding opinion” finding that there was “no evidence in the record that the [St. Clair County] State’s Attorney’s Office performed any search at all” for its findings in police killings, and “improperly denied the request.” The PAC issues around 15 binding opinions, which require agencies to either comply or challenge the attorney general's office in court, per year, compared to hundreds of other cases that it deals with in nonbinding opinions or mediation.
The state's attorney’s office has since released findings in 16 cases, including some nonfatal shootings that are not technically subject to the public reporting requirement, but there still appear to be gaps in the records released. The dashboard maintained by the Illinois State Police shows additional cases not provided.
In addition, while some records regarding deaths in the St. Clair County Jail were provided, none of them shows the state’s attorney’s office making any determination about the actions of jail deputies or staff, as Madison County did and is required by law.
Vague language in Illinois law leaves questions about police reporting
Experts don’t expect much to change about the system in Illinois until the language in the law is clarified. That’s because it’s simply too vague and allows for wildly disparate interpretations of what information must be released and who is responsible, said Loren Jones of Impact for Equity.
“The act mentions that the investigators are required to release the report. If there are no charges brought against the officers or there's no indictment, it's unclear what needs to be included in that report,” she said, adding that there aren’t even any guidelines around when these need to be released.
It’s unclear exactly what legislators meant by “the investigators shall publicly release a report.” The language was inserted in an amendment to an existing bill and was not discussed during either the House Judiciary-Criminal Committee meeting where legislators approved the amendment or on the Senate floor, according to legislative records.
The plain text implies that the investigating agency — in Madison and St. Clair counties, usually the Illinois State Police — and not the state’s attorney’s office, is responsible for the public release of the report, said Eileen Prescott, a law professor at Wake Forest University and director of its Accountable Prosecutor Project.
“This strikes me as inefficient,” she wrote in an email, “but the General Assembly may have meant to keep the investigators independent even from the State's Attorney's Office.”
The Madison County state’s attorney’s office pointed to this language in its explanation for why it has not published any of its decision letters.
“Standard protocol in this county calls for local law enforcement agencies to request the Illinois State Police conduct independent investigations into officer-involved deaths,” Brueggemann wrote.
“Once complete, the Madison County State’s Attorney’s Office conducts a close review and issues a written report to ISP. Then ISP, as the ‘investigator’ referenced in the statute in question, routinely issues a public report on the outcome via their online dashboard.”
That dashboard, however, contains inconsistent information and does not appear to include the findings letters for any cases in Madison County.
“Case status, video, and general information is reported on the Officer-Involved Investigations dashboard indicating when there is prosecutorial declination of charges, and the full case file will be available to the public upon request, subject to any legal exemptions, fulfilling ISP’s requirements under the Act,” Melaney Arnold, an ISP spokesperson, wrote in an email. “The decision to prosecute or charge/indict is determined by the state's attorney's office or special prosecutor.”
Neither Attorney General Kwame Raoul nor state Sen. Elgie Sims Jr., who each carried the amendment while serving in the state Senate and House, respectively, responded to requests for comment.
However, at least two other large prosecutor’s offices in Illinois have outlined exactly how they interpret the law, directly contradicting Madison County. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office publishes the official policy of its Law Enforcement Accountability Division on its website. In the section about communications to the public, after discussing the legal limitations placed on public releases of information by various state and federal laws or rules, the state’s attorney’s office then outlines:
“At the conclusion of the investigation, if no criminal charges are brought, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office will post a memorandum on its website explaining the facts of the case, the legal principles involved, and the reasons for the decision.”
Similarly, the state’s attorney’s office in Winnebago County, based in Rockford, published a statement and FAQ document about its role in police shootings and in-custody deaths.
In it, the office writes, “If charges are not approved, the SAO will issue a public statement — a memorandum of decision — providing the facts and legal theories underlying the decision.”
These policies more closely align with national best practices pointed to by Prescott, including a 2019 toolkit from the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which calls for prosecutors to publicly discuss their “decision, evidence, and rationale” for not charging an officer.
Chris Allen, a spokesperson for the St. Clair County state’s attorney’s office, wrote in an email that “the policies around the manner in which our office releases these letters is under review.”
The gaps, loopholes and vague language in the law point to a need for more legislation, Jones said. She compared the single paragraph about police killings and in-custody deaths to a requirement to report general uses of force that was passed in the 2021 SAFE-T Act. Local and state agencies are not yet fully compliant with the new law, but it provides far more specific benchmarks to hold them accountable.
The new use-of-force reporting requirements also came with enforcement power; the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board can withhold funding if an agency fails to report fully or accurately. While this hasn’t happened yet, there’s still “a function there to spur people to report,” she said. “There is a mechanism in place that can be pulled and advocacy that can be done to change that.”
Without further legislation, she said, there will continue to be no real “parameters” around the true role and responsibility of prosecutors in communicating their decisions to not file charges when Illinoisans are killed by police or die in their custody. That ultimately leaves “sort of a dearth” of information in Illinois, she continued — and “a gap for clarity, timeliness and transparency about officer-related deaths for the public.”
For Franklin, the East St. Louis community organizer, making sure the public can review these decisions is an essential part of government transparency.
“We need forward-thinking people in these offices that are making these decisions so that you don't have to jump through all these hoops to get the truth.”
This story was produced in collaboration with Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago; Illinois Public Media News, the NPR/PBS member station based in Champaign-Urbana; and St. Louis Public Radio, the NPR member station in the St. Louis region. It was supported by the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill; and by the University of Vermont Center for Community News.
A previous version of this story focused on the Will County state’s attorney’s office, which stopped creating findings letters altogether in 2020. Read that version here.
Sam Stecklow is an investigative journalist and FOIA fellow at the Invisible Institute. Follow him on Bluesky at @samstecklow.bsky.social or email him at sam@invisibleinstitute.com.
Will Bauer is the Metro East reporter at St. Louis Public Radio.
Chris Weber is a freelance journalist and graduate student. He reported this story as an investigative reporting intern with Invisible Institute through the Governors State University Center for Community Media.
Send questions and comments about this story to feedback@stlpublicradio.org.