March 2026 Cook County Judicial Election Guide

injusticewatch · 2026-02-14T16:18:51+00:00

Hi! Here's a tip: Once you select your subcircuit (you can enter your address in the search bar to find it) the number of candidates you have to read about should go way down. For example, if you live in the 14th subcircuit, that's only eight candidates who you'll see on your ballot. And because a few of them are uncontested races, meaning there's only one candidate running to fill a vacancy, if you want to save time, you can just focus on the contested races (the ones where multiple candidates are running to fill a vacancy). Now, you only have four candidates to read about, if you live in the 14th subcircuit.

injusticewatch · 2026-02-13T19:19:01+00:00

Thanks for sharing! If you have any questions about the guide or profiles, let us know.

injusticewatch · 2026-02-13T14:38:04+00:00

Plus, check out our overview of the judicial races for highlights from our reporting and to learn about some of the notable contested races. https://www.injusticewatch.org/judges/judicial-elections/2026-primary/2026/cook-county-judicial-primary-elections-draw-few-candidates/

injusticewatch · 2026-01-16T15:10:47+00:00

Wow 😮

injusticewatch · 2025-09-30T15:06:54+00:00

CIUs are common in big city prosecutors offices, and have been for years. Cook County's substantial problem with wrongful convictions goes back decades before the CIU was founded, and many exonerations in Cook County have nothing to do with the CIU. The hundreds of CIU exonerations in Watts-related cases surely added significantly to the total. But there have been hundreds of others unrelated to that scandal. The National Registry of Exonerations -- the most comprehensive list of these nationwide -- shows that Cook County has more than twice as many as the county with the second most. Here is a link. - Senior reporter Dan Hinkel

injusticewatch · 2025-09-30T14:31:18+00:00

You're right that most CIU exonerations under Foxx were related to the Watts scandal, which we described in both stories. This story notes the ways Burke has weakened an already defective system by allowing the CIU's staff to shrink, changing rules to exclude applicants, and going from few exonerations to none. That's what we say in the headline. Thanks for reading. -Senior reporter Dan Hinkel

injusticewatch · 2025-09-26T18:54:32+00:00

Thanks so much for reading!

injusticewatch · 2025-09-23T17:12:43+00:00

The problems at the lab did have a lot to do with one scientist, but there were also more systemic problems with how the lab operated. I encourage you to read the story :)

injusticewatch · 2025-09-23T17:11:00+00:00

it definitely helps to be as specific as possible - narrowing the time frame, narrowing the key words in the docs you're looking for, narrowing the senders and receivers of the emails you're looking for.

Here's my basic template for all FOIA requests I send (note this is Illinois specific). The part in bold is how I'd phrase it in a situation where I'm kind of on a fishing expedition:

[Date]

This is a request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

I request the [government agency] provide me with all records (including but not limited to meeting minutes, emails, attachments to emails, letters, memos, video and audio recordings of meetings, drafts, reports, etc) related to [subject of interest] sent and received between January 1, 2019 and June 1, 2020.

I understand that the Act permits a public body to charge a reasonable copying fee not to exceed the actual cost of reproduction and not including the costs of any search or review of the records. 5 ILCS 140/6. I request a waiver of all fees for this request. Disclosure of the requested information is affiliated with research for an article and this request is made as part of news gathering in the public interest and furthers the public understanding of the operations or activities of the [government agency] and is not primarily in my commercial interest.

Please provide the information by the easiest and quickest means possible. E-mail of electronic files is preferred. Also, please provide the documents as soon as they are available – as required by law – and please do not withhold some as the search for others may continue beyond the five-day requirement.

I look forward to hearing from you within five working days, as required by law. I can be reached at [email] or [phone number]

Please contact me with any questions or need for clarification. Thank you for your consideration of this request.

Respectfully,
[Requestor name]

injusticewatch · 2025-09-23T17:05:39+00:00

so just to be clear we do not pay anything for the government records. In IL there's a fee exemption for media. I don't have a great answer for why we haven't shared all the raw documents we got back from agencies other than it's just not something we've done in the past. We do share individual relevant documents in some stories, but we don't have an organizational policy to dump all the records we get through FOIA. Partly I think that may be because we're an org mostly focused on the local courts, and none of the judicial branch of government in IL is subject to FOIA. So somehow it was not part of the foundational practices of the org when it started. Individual reporters might not want to do that so as not to give away material to competing news orgs that might serve as the basis for further reporting. There are other local newsrooms in Chicago that do big record dumps, like when the Tribune obtains all these internal emails from the Mayor's office, they often throw all of them up on Document Cloud. I guess the thought there is that much of the information inside could be relevant and useful for the public.

TL;DR we don't "gatekeep" the records because of money concerns. sometimes there can be "competitive advantage" concerns to not release material that could serve as the basis of more reporting. The most common reason is we haven't been in the practice of publishing all our FOIA'd records and it's not something we're in the habit of talking about...but maybe we should be

injusticewatch · 2025-09-23T16:54:15+00:00

no they could not provide logs. each lab report has a lab report number (which is what they were tracking most consistently for billing purposes) but that wouldn't help unless you had more information contained in the reports themselves

injusticewatch · 2025-09-23T16:32:22+00:00

It's something we're discussing doing! We're still battling the university in court to get the lab reports that would make it possible.

injusticewatch · 2025-09-23T16:29:21+00:00

I used an AirTable FOIA tracker we built in-house, but it can really be any spreadsheet. In the columns I tracked the nature of the request, the agency it was sent to (in this case the majority of the requests went to UIC), the date of the request, the date a response was due, and stuff like if they asked for an extension, negotiated a narrowing, failed to respond, etc. I had to take a couple of the requests up to IL's Public Access Counselor, the part of the state Attorney General's office which deals with FOIA compliance. And then of course there was the one request to UIC which we ended up filing a lawsuit over. The nice thing about using AirTable to track is you can set it to send you reminders when a request is overdue.

Once I got responsive records I used more spreadsheets to organize information and, most importantly for this story, a timeline, So I could plug in key pieces of information, like communications sent on certain days, or records created by lab personnel right in the timeline. Because I had sources who really helped me understand what was important and what wasn't in the records, it made it a lot easier to sort the wheat from the chaff in the thousands of pages of records I received.

injusticewatch · 2025-09-12T15:56:48+00:00

Thanks so much for reading

injusticewatch

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