SAFE-T Act Amendment Filed In Final Days Of 2022 Veto Session

SPRINGFIELD, IL — Ahead of the Jan. 1 effective date of the SAFE-T Act, the state senator who first introduced the Pretrial Fairness Act this week filed a 308-page amendment to the bill that ends cash bail in Illinois.

The proposed legislation would add a series of additional offenses to those eligible for pretrial detention next year and give broader discretion to judges to consider a person's danger to the community when considering whether to order them held while awaiting trial.

The Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today, or SAFE-T Act, was passed in the final hours of the last Illinois General Assembly in January 2021. Thursday is the final day of the veto session scheduled for 2022.

The Illinois Supreme Court consolidated legal challenges to the act filed by 62 county prosecutors into a single case, which is currently pending before a Kankakee County judge with oral arguments scheduled for next month.

Sen. Robert Peters, a Democrat from Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood whose Pretrial Fairness Act was incorporated into the SAFE-T Act, filed a Senate floor amendment to House Bill 1095 late Tuesday, becoming its alternate chief sponsor.

On Wednesday, Sen. Scott Bennett, who had earlier proposed his own Senate amendment to the SAFE-T Act, and Sen. Elgie Sims, an original sponsor of the act, were added as alternate chief co-sponsors.

The amendment looks to clarify the implementation of the law for people currently out on bail or awaiting trial in jail because they cannot afford the cash bail set in their case. Everyone is entitled to a hearing within 90 days or less, depending on the severity of the charges. The bill also lays out a process for what to do with previously deposited cash bail, setting slightly different rules for Cook County and the rest of the state.

Peters' amendment includes several changes to the process for determining who should be jailed ahead of trial.

Under the revised version of Sec. 110-6.1, people who are charged with certain forcible felonies are eligible for denial of pretrial release, regardless of whether the offense would be probationable. Plus, people who are charged with non-forcible felonies that still require mandatory imprisonment are eligible for pretrial detention.

The bill lays our procedures for how judges should handle people arrested with multiple warrants from different counties and when court proceedings can be held using video-teleconferencing software.

And it adds a list of additional felony offenses that, if a defendant is found to pose a "real and present threat to the safety of any person or persons in the community, based on the specific articulable facts of the case," can result in the denial of pretrial release.

They include hate crimes, reckless homicide, threatening a public official, residential burglary, child abduction and endangerment, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon other than a firearm and certain aggravated driving under the influence and animal cruelty offenses.

The amendment also changes the definition of "willful flight." Previously, the bill defined it as "planning or attempting to intentionally evade prosecution by concealing oneself. Simple past non-appearance in court alone is not evidence of future intent to evade prosecution."

The new definition says willful flight is "intentional conduct with a purpose to thwart the judicial process to avoid prosecution. Isolated instances of nonappearance in court alone are not evidence of the risk of willful flight. Reoccurrence and patterns of intentional conduct to evade prosecution, along with any affirmative steps to communicate or remedy any such missed court date, may be considered as factors in assessing future intent to evade prosecution."

House Democrats have indicated they support the Senate amendment, WCIA reported. Peters told reporters Wednesday that he believes his fellow Democrats, who maintained their supermajorities in both chambers in this month's elections, will support his amendment.

Republicans have claimed they have been "frozen out" of the process, telling Capitol News Illinois earlier this month that Senate discussions included representatives of a pair of law enforcement groups law groups and three state's attorneys but not Senate Republicans.

Peters said Wednesday that his amendment is the result of a "host of conversations" in recent months, according to the Associated Press.

“We still have a detention net that is very clear, judges have discretion within that detention net,” the state senator said. “But again, the intent and the core parts of this legislation remain intact.”