Cook County Circuit Clerk Iris Martinez Spreads Misinformation about Court Appearance Rates

The Briefing

In a letter to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and an opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune, Circuit Clerk Iris Martinez made several baseless claims about the Pretrial Fairness Act. Her allegations have been widely debunked by researchers, judges, prosecutors, and public defenders. For example:

Martinez inaccurately attributed the issuance of over 31,000 felony warrants to the Pretrial Fairness Act, failing to clarify that most of these warrants predate the law.

She misleadingly claimed that defendants missed court over 67,000 times since the law’s enactment, without providing definitions or distinguishing cases initiated before the law’s implementation.  The transparently absurd claim that more court dates have been missed than cases have been filed raises serious concerns that Martinez’s numbers have fundamental and incurable flaws.

She falsely stated that money bond was “essentially eliminated” in 2017, contradicting academic studies showing that money bonds were still commonly ordered as late as 2018.

In contrast, credible data from Cook County Circuit Court’s Pretrial Fairness Act Weekly Dashboard reveals that her figures are significantly inflated and lack proper parameters for analysis. This is also contradicted by rigorous research from Loyola University showing that failure-to-appear rates have declined slightly under the Act, from 13.6% to 12.5%.