Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has instructed her office to resume sending some people with gun possession charges to the county’s Restorative Justice Community Courts (RJCC), which reroute young people with nonviolent charges from criminal courts to an alternative program. Upon completion, the charge is dismissed.
The move comes nearly a year after O’Neill Burke instructed her office not to divert gun possession cases to the RJCC. That gutted the RJCC caseload, 82.8% of which had been dedicated to adjudicating gun possession cases, according to the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, which advocates for equitable legal systems.
“We believe in RJCCs; we want them to be successful,” said Yvette Loizon, chief of policy and external affairs for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. “We recognized that by not putting gun cases in the RJCCs, we were restricting their workload significantly.”…