The Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA) took full effect in September 2023. The landmark legislation fully abolished cash bail in Illinois—the first state in the nation to do so. It also required prosecutors to petition judges when they believe someone should be detained before trial and established a three-prong test for judges to consider, along with the specific facts of each case, before granting those requests.
But a report released last month by a criminal legal reform coalition scrutinizes the individualized application of the PFA in Cook County’s Leighton Criminal Court Building. The report, titled Changing Landscapes: Community Court-Watchers’ Observations of the Second Year of Pretrial Fairness Act Implementation and released by the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ), collated the observations of 50 court watchers who observed pretrial detention hearings over 28 days between May and June 2025.
The study claims judges ordered people to be detained ahead of trial in about three-quarters of the instances that Cook County prosecutors requested it. “It seems as though the default decision is to detain—the burden of proof seems to be on the defense rather than the prosecutor,” the report cited one court watcher as noting…