ST. CLAIR COUNTY, Ill. — In courtrooms around the state early this week, judges conducted the first hearings under a new system that determines whether a defendant will be jailed while awaiting trial based on dangerousness and risk of fleeing prosecution, rather than their ability to post bail.
The abolition of cash bail was included in the SAFE-T Act criminal justice reform of 2021 and originally slated to take effect Jan. 1, though court challenges delayed its implementation until Monday.
In St. Clair County Circuit Court, where nearly 2,000 felony cases and more than 3,400 misdemeanors are filed annually, at least one person was released from jail to await trial on the second day the SAFE-T Act’s bail reform provisions were in effect.
A woman accused of aggravated domestic battery for hitting her partner with a piece of wood was released on Tuesday morning. A mother of a newborn, she was released after a detention hearing found she was not a flight risk or a threat to the public or a specific person.
St. Clair County held three detention hearings Monday morning. All three were previously held on cash bail in cases filed before the SAFE-T Act went into effect. The new law entitled defendants held in lieu of bail prior to Monday’s effective date to petition to have their cases moved to the new system.
Two of those defendants stand accused of first-degree murder and another was being held on firearms charges. The hearings resembled detention hearings held in federal court – which has not used cash bail as a detention method since 1984 – with testimony focusing on whether the person is a flight risk or a danger to the public or a specific person.
“We are all going to make some interesting law this morning,” St. Clair County Judge John O’Gara said as he began the first hearing in his courtroom on Monday morning.
In a basement courtroom in the Kane County Judicial Center — the county’s St. Charles-based criminal courthouse — six defendants were called before Judge Salvatore LoPiccolo for initial appearance hearings Monday morning.
Of the six, all but one of whom had been arrested since Kane County’s last-ever bond call ended around noon on Sunday, four were released after their initial conditions hearing. Two remained in custody until the afternoon detention hearings, at which prosecutors asked the judge to keep them in jail.
Bond hearings have historically been quick affairs, often with no defense attorneys present for indigent defendants who wouldn’t get assigned a public defender until later in their case. But detention hearings in Kane County on Monday afternoon took about 15 minutes each. Both the state’s attorney and the public defender assigned to handle this week’s hearings laid out their cases for whether the defendant should continue to be held in Kane County Jail or released.
All parties and the judge also had access to the defendants’ criminal history, a practice that isn’t new in either Kane or St. Clair county courts, but is a novel development in many counties that have been working with the Office of Statewide Pretrial Services, which has been staffing up to compile those reports for the better part of a year.
DETENTION FOR MURDER SUSPECT: O’Gara, in St. Clair County, presided over the detention hearing for Darrayvia Crump, who was charged with first-degree murder in connection with the shooting of Ivan Marshall in the back of an O’Fallon restaurant last year.
Crump did not fire the gun, Assistant State’s Attorney Erica Mazzotti said during the detention hearing, but did drive the vehicle to the location even after one of her co-defendants said they were “going to rob the dude.” Crump continued to drive her two co-defendants to the scene, making her legally accountable under Illinois law.
Cheryl Whitley, Crump’s attorney, said her client provided information that aided the investigation and would agree to home detention with a monitoring device.
O’Gara found Crump ineligible for release.
After the hearing, Crump was returned to the St. Clair County Jail where she will be held until her trial. She has been there since May 2022. Her bond was previously set at $1.5 million, of which she would have needed to pay 10 percent, or $150,000, to be released.
DETENTION FOR MURDER SUSPECT: In the second St. Clair County hearing, Assistant Public Defender Tom Philo, who represented Trevon Raymond, requested his release. Raymond is charged with first-degree murder in connection with the shooting death of Michael Triplett in East St. Louis on Sept. 21, 2021.
Months after the murder, Raymond was involved in a high-speed chase on the Stan Musial Bridge after shots were fired at an East St. Louis gas station. Raymond crashed his car, allegedly tossed a gun into the weeds and…
Read More: Murder suspects previously eligible to post bond are held in jail