By Dermot Connolly
The Democratic primary race for Cook County state’s attorney is shaping up as one of the most competitive contests on March 19, with Eileen O’Neill Burke and Clayton Harris III pitted against each other in a bid to replace Kim Foxx.
The winner will face Republican Bob Fioretti and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski in the Nov. 5 general election. The two are running unopposed in their party primaries.
Both Harris and O’Neill Burke describe themselves as “lifelong Democrats” and started their legal careers as assistant Cook County state’s attorneys before going off in different directions.
Clayton Harris III described himself as a “military brat” who moved around the country with his family every three years while growing up. He earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace technology at Middle Tennessee University and moved to Chicago after earning his JD at Howard University Law School.
While at Howard, he was recruited to become an assistant Cook County state’s attorney under former state’s attorney Richard Devine. He served as a prosecutor in Criminal Appeals, Traffic, and Special Prosecutions: Narcotics.
He then joined the City of Chicago’s Intergovernmental Affairs team, advocating for public safety resources in Springfield, before becoming counsel for the Chicago Department of Transportation. Harris also has served as chief of staff of the Illinois Department of Transportation and at the governor’s office, managing 60,000 state employees.
He earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where he has been a lecturer for the past 14 years. He currently teaches Policing Race in America: Black, White & Blue, where he said “challenges with policing are discussed and addressed in search of an answer toward justice for all. I feel my experience in all these different areas makes me uniquely suited for this position. I can multitask.”
He and his wife, Trena, live in the Washington Park neighborhood on the South Side with their two sons, ages 9 and 11.
“I thought it was the right time to come back to the state’s attorney’s office,” said Harris, explaining that, as parents, he and his wife know how important community safety is for everyone.
“We have to be focused on safety and justice,” he said. “I want to make sure we are telling both sides of the story. I have lived experience avoiding gunshots and being pulled over while driving while black.”
If elected, Harris is “going to be focused on special prosecutions carjackings, retail theft, and gun crimes,” noting the state’s attorney’s office already has units dedicated to those major areas. “We want to get to the root causes of these crimes. We have to cut off the heads of these syndicates,” referring to the major players directing juvenile offenders and others in committing crimes.
He said assistant state’s attorneys also will be “embedded” within the Chicago Police Department to help get to the bottom of gun crimes, which he called “already the most charged and prosecuted crimes.”
The Safety Act “is working excellently as it is; the people who are making the community less safe are being detained,” said Harris, referring to the somewhat controversial new law that got rid of cash bail in Illinois last year.
“It gives us an opportunity to move forward; we are stopping criminalizing poverty,” he said, noting assistant state’s attorneys now file detainment petitions for people charged with violent felonies and judges make the decision at bond hearings.
“We can’t allow people to believe there are not consequences for crimes,” he added. “We hold everyone responsible, but appropriately.”
Harris said he would continue Foxx’s policy of not charging people with felonies for retail thefts of merchandise worth less than $1,000, a policy with which O’Neill Burke disagrees. Foxx, who decided not to run for a third term in office, would raise the retail theft charge to a felony only for cases involving less than $1,000 if there were ten previous convictions for the same crime.
For more on Harris, go to www.claytonharrisforcook.com/.
Under State law prosecutors can charge defendants who allegedly stole more than $300 worth of goods with a felony, “and I will stick to that,” said Eileen O’Neill Burke, who stepped down from her seat on the 1st District appellate court last year to run for state’s attorney.
“If there is an appetite to change the law, you can go to the legislature, but you can’t just disregard it,” said the retired judge, a fourth-generation Chicagoan who said her great-grandmother was a baby in the city when the Great Chicago Fire happened in 1871.
“We probably go back before that,” said O’Neill Burke, who grew up on the Northwest Side and now lives in the South Loop with her husband, John Burke. They have four children they raised in Park Ridge, IL.
O’Neill Burke went from St. Mary of the Lake Elementary School to Marillac High School and on to the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. After earning her law degree at Chicago Kent-College of Law, she began working as an assistant state’s attorney in Cook County in 1991.After ten years in that role, she worked as a criminal defense attorney for eight years.
While on the bench, she served as president of the Illinois Judges Association and led that organization’s classroom education efforts for thousands of elementary and high school students. She also served as a youth counselor in her church and trustee for the Park Ridge Library Board.
“I came back to run for state’s attorney because I don’t think the justice system is working right now,” she said. “The system is broken, and it needs someone with my level of experience to fix it.”
The former judge said a major problem is not enough assistant state’s attorneys to handle the caseload.
“The office is woefully understaffed,” O’Neill Burke asserted. “Women are waiting too long for orders of protection, and people are waiting years in jail for trials.”
When she joined the office in 1991, 2,300 people competed for 50 spots, she said. Newly qualified lawyers no longer find the positions as attractive, however.
“We have hundreds of vacancies now,” O’Neill Burke said. “But we can correct that. I want to make the state’s attorney’s office a training ground for the best prosecutors. I want the state’s attorney’s office to be like getting a master’s degree in law.”
She described the Safety Act as a “once-in-a-generation” change in state law.
“It is a positive change,” she added. “Unless you are a danger to the community, you shouldn’t be incarcerated before trial.”
Eliminating cash bail “changes the state’s attorney’s role in pre-trial detention,” she said. “If the state’s attorney does not file a petition for detention, the judge does not have any discretion on what can be done. We have to make sure assistant state’s attorneys are trained to know when it is appropriate to file the petitions.”
As for when thefts should be raised to a felony, O’Neill Burke said sticking to the $300 limit does not mean that every case will be charged the same.
“We do have discretion,” she explained. “But right now, many stores aren’t even calling the police for retail thefts because they believe they won’t be prosecuted.”
She stressed her commitment to making Chicago and the rest of the county safer.
“People are sick of all the crime,” O’Neill Burke noted. “I want people to be able to ride the CTA and not be victimized. People shouldn’t have to have their head on a swivel” on the lookout for possible attackers.
“The city is awash in guns right now,” O’Neill Burke added, noting tools available to law enforcement such as the State assault weapons ban should be enforced.
She pointed out that, in several recent cases of fatal shootings, the shooters used guns with extended magazines, which fall under the assault weapons ban that passed in Springfield last year. The law is facing some legal challenges, but it remains on the books.
“We have this tool in the assault weapons ban, and we need to be asking for detention [in gun crimes] until we start enforcing the law,” she said.
O’Neill Burke’s website is https://www.justiceforcookcounty.com/.