Current litigation, filed by state’s attorneys who have standing because the SAFE-T Act will dictate what they can and cannot do, asserts that this State act, as written, is unconstitutional. More than one-half of the 102 state’s attorneys of Illinois have joined as plaintiffs in these lawsuits. Their standing makes this an urgent constitutional case for the courts of Illinois to decide.
At the same time, police officers and law enforcement professionals have solidified their case against the controversial State law, which is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2023. Neither the police, nor elected state’s attorneys, nor advocates for crime victims’ rights were consulted prior to the sudden passage of this bill in the “midnight hours” of the lame-duck session night of January 2021.
The policy case against the Democrats’ SAFE-T Act focuses on six major flaws in the new law:
- It ends cash bail without containing any recourse for victims
- It zeroes out the ability of a judge to control the behavior of a defendant prior to trial
- It makes some crimes, including dangerous and violent crimes, non-detainable
- It erases all of the case law that Illinois prosecutors have used to show that a defendant is a threat to the community
- It erases almost all of the case law that Illinois prosecutors have used to show a high likelihood of willful flight by a defendant
- If the Act remains in force without change, thousands of persons accused of criminal offense, including violent criminal offenses, will be released out on to Illinois streets beginning on January 1, 2023.