Cash Bail

Illinois' high court put the SAFE-T Act criminal justice reform — short for Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today — on hold in December just hours before it was scheduled to take effect. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case.

The future of cash bail in Illinois is in the hands of the state’s Supreme Court.

Legal advocates discuss the future of the law to eliminate cash bail in Illinois, now that the state Supreme Court has halted its implementation.

The justices issued their order Saturday evening, hours before the new law was slated to take effect, to maintain the status quo across the state.

As a state task force works to ready justice system, amendments could be forthcoming.

Cash bail has largely disappeared in St. Louis. Instead, circuit court judges are increasingly denying bond altogether, a new report from the Freedom Community Center found.

St. Louis attorneys and activists say judges are often denying defendants bond entirely after the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019 made it harder for courts to detain people on cash bail pretrial. “It’s a classic case of the system recalibrating and in some ways achieving many of the same results,” said Blake Strode, executive director of civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders.

Robin Steinberg, CEO of the Bail Project, and Mike Milton, founder and CEO of the Freedom Community Center, discuss the work done by the Bail Project in its three years here — and explain why its St. Louis office is closing.

Police, prosecutors, defenders and judges prepare to enact more than 700 pages of legislation.

Advocates are celebrating a new law that will end wealth-based pretrial detention in Illinois. With Gov. J.B. Pritzker's signature yesterday, the state becomes the first in the country to eliminate cash bail.