Our friends at Uptown People’s Law Center and The Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center are speaking truth to power in this new op-ed on Dart’s illegal policy of detaining people who have been ordered released:

“[Dart’s] actions — willfully failing to obey judicial orders — have no place in a democratic society. Last September, the Cook County Circuit Court created a new policy mandating that bail be set in an amount that defendants can afford to pay. It was an essential step toward fixing a pretrial system that has historically discriminated against the poor and minorities in this county.

Now Dart claims this reform has led to an unprecedented increase in the number of people accused of gun crimes being released from jail on electronic monitoring. He says this trend justifies his willful disregard of judicial decisions about who should be released pretrial.

Dart’s claim is demonstrably false. It also distorts who should be making jail-release decisions for people who are presumed innocent of committing any crime.”

Read the full letter to the editor.