Kendall County State’s Attorney preparing for cashless bail law ‘either way’ amid legal challenge

The state’s controversial SAFE-T Act and its cashless bail component is scheduled to take effect with the new year, but the law could be upended on Dec. 28 in a Kankakee County courtroom.

Kendall County State’s Attorney Eric Weis and his counterparts from around the state are challenging the constitutionality of the Safety, Accountability, Fairness, Equality-Today Act.

Whenever a law is found to be unconstitutional, it is automatically appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

If this happens, the justices could place a stay on the law until they have delved into the constitutional questions or they could allow the law to take effect while they continue deliberations.

However, if the trial court upholds the law, the state’s attorneys would appeal to an appellate court, which would be unlikely to place a stay on the law while it conducts its hearings.

“We are preparing for this either way, regardless of what happens,” Weis told the Kendall County Board on Dec. 20. “You have to have a contingency plan.”

The amended law signed by Gov. JB Pritzker adds to the list of offenses for which a person may be detained, including aggravated battery and aggravated drunken driving involving a death, Weis said.

“There were a lot of good changes that came about,” Weis said of the amendments to the law.

Moreover, prosecutors will need only show that an offender represents a threat to the community at-large, rather than just a single identifiable individual, Weis said.

In addition, the amended law now allows for arrest warrants to be issued for those who fail to appear in court, changing a provision of the original act that had drawn considerable criticism.

However, burglary is still not an offense for which someone may be detained under the new law, Weis said.

“The law is better but there are still a lot of issues,” Weis said.

The new law will affect bond call procedures as well as county jail inmates already in custody, Weis said.

Prisoners will need to file petitions for their release, Weis said, and judges will have specific time frames of up to 90 days to act, depending on the severity of the offense.

Weis and 57 other county state’s attorneys from Illinois filed lawsuits challenging the SAFE-T Act on constitutional grounds, before the trailer bill and its amendments were introduced and signed by the governor.

The sweeping SAFE-T Act is more than 750 pages and includes a variety of policing and judicial reforms. Under the Illinois Constitution, only appropriations bills are exempt from a requirement that a piece of legislation must be confined to a single subject.

The complaint also alleges that the cashless bail system violates protections for crime victims included in the state constitution.

The lawsuits challenging the act were consolidated into a single case now being argued in Kankakee.