 | |
| Founded | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Founder |
|
| Type | Investigative journalism |
| 47-4537172 | |
| Legal status | 501(c)(3) |
| Focus | Judiciary of Illinois |
| Location |
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Area served | Chicagoland |
| Budget | $1.14 million (in 2022) |
| Revenue | $2.27 million (in 2022) |
| Website | www |
Injustice Watch is a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Chicago, covering the Circuit Court of Cook County and other parts of the criminal justice system in the region. [1]
Injustice Watch was co-founded by Center on Wrongful Convictions founder Rob Warden [2] and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Tulsky in 2015. [3]
The organization's work has been described as "activism journalism," rejecting the idea of journalistic objectivity in favor of a focus on "fairness" and "ethics." [1] Injustice Watch also publishes a guide for voters to learn more about candidates for election or retention to the state judiciary. [4] [5] [6]
Injustice Watch's coverage of bail hearings, [7] pre-trial detention, [8] and prosecutorial discretion [9] [10] have received attention from legal scholars. [11] In 2019, the organization announced the Plain View Project, a database documenting the use of racist language online by police officers, [12] [13] [14] which has been used as evidence for racial bias in American policing [15] and was a finalist in the 2020 Online Journalism Awards. [16] In 2023, the organization received an award in the "small newsrooms" category from the Better Government Association for its coverage of court-ordered remote alcohol monitoring. [17]
The Criminal Court of the City of New York is a court of the State Unified Court System in New York City that handles misdemeanors and lesser offenses, and also conducts arraignments and preliminary hearings in felony cases.
The Vera Institute of Justice is a United States 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank focused on criminal justice reform. It was founded in 1961 in New York City.
Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.
Law enforcement in Niger is the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense though the National Gendarmerie and the Ministry of the Interior through the National Police and the National Guard, a paramilitary police force.
Pre-trial detention, also known as jail, preventive detention, provisional detention, or remand, is the process of detaining a person until their trial after they have been arrested and charged with an offence. A person who is on remand is held in a prison or detention centre or held under house arrest. Varying terminology is used, but "remand" is generally used in common law jurisdictions and "preventive detention" elsewhere. However, in the United States, "remand" is rare except in official documents and "jail" is instead the main terminology. Detention before charge is commonly referred to as custody and continued detention after conviction is referred to as imprisonment.
The history of human rights in Argentina is affected by the last civil-military dictatorship in the country (1976-1983) and its aftermath. The dictatorship is known in North America as the "Dirty War", a named coined by the dictatorship itself to justify their actions of State-sponsored terrorism against Argentine citizenry, which were backed by the United States as part of their planned Operation Condor, and carried out primarily by Jorge Rafael Videla's de facto rule (1976-1981), but also after it and until democracy was restored in 1983. However, the human rights situation in Argentina has improved significantly since the end of the dictatorship.
The Cook County State's Attorney, Eileen O'Neill Burke, functions as the state of Illinois's district attorney for Cook County, Illinois, and heads the second-largest prosecutor's office in the United States. The office has over 600 attorneys and 1,200 employees. In addition to direct criminal prosecution, the state's attorney's office files legal actions to enforce child support orders, protect consumers and the elderly from exploitation, and assist thousands of victims of domestic violence every year.
Penny J. White is an American attorney and former judge who served as a judge on Tennessee's First Judicial Circuit, a judge for the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, and a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court. she was the second woman to serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court. White was removed from office in a judicial retention election in 1996 as the only justice to lose a retention election in Tennessee under the Tennessee Plan. After her time in the judiciary, White served as a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law until retiring in 2022.
Ronnie Abrams is a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Bail in the United States refers to the practice of releasing suspects from custody before their hearing, on payment of bail, which is money or pledge of property to the court which may be refunded if suspects return to court for their trial. Bail practices in the United States vary from state to state.
Amy Bach is an American a journalist, attorney, and author of Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, for which she won the 2010 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Measures for Justice, a nonprofit that collects and publishes county-level criminal justice performance data. She founded the organization after she published her book.
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about inequities within the U.S. criminal justice system. The Marshall Project has been described as an advocacy group by some, and works to impact the system through journalism.
Chalkbeat is a non-profit news organization that covers education in several American communities. Its mission is to "inform the decisions and actions that lead to better outcomes for children and families by providing deep, local coverage of education policy and practice." It aims to cover "the effort to improve schools for all children, especially those who have historically lacked access to a quality education". Its areas of focus include under-reported stories, education policy, equity, trends, and local reporting.
The Bail Project is a 501 (c)(3) non profit organization aiming to pay bail for people who are not financially capable of doing so themselves. The Bail Project also provides pretrial services. The Bail Project was founded in 2017 by Robin Steinberg. In January 2018, the organization launched its first site as a national operation. As of 2020, it has 22 locations across the United States and has helped pay bail for over 12,000 people.
Cynthia Ellen Jones is a criminal defense attorney and professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law specializing in criminal law and procedure as well as bail reform. Jones is an expert in racial disparities in the pretrial system and was previously the Director of the Public Defenders Service in Washington, D.C. She is a leading scholar in criminal procedure. In 2011, she was awarded the American University Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching. Jones was the director of the Stephen S. Weinstein Trial Advocacy Program at the university. She has written three textbooks related to criminal law and procedure.
States Newsroom is a nonprofit news network in the United States. Its newsrooms focus mostly on state politics.
The 2022 Illinois judicial elections consisted of both partisan and retention elections.
The Chicago Community Bond Fund is a non-profit bail fund that through donations from the public posts bail bonds for people who could otherwise not afford it. Starting from an informal effort to bail out several people who were arrested at a vigil for a Black man who had been killed by the Chicago Police, the fund saw a considerable increase in donations following the murder of George Floyd and the protests and arrests in Chicago that followed. Taking a crime-agnostic view on providing bail, arguing that it is judges who determine if a person is a threat to the general public by offering cash bail and that the presumption of innocence applies to all, the fund has posted the bonds of hundreds of people accused of crimes, including a number charged with violent crimes.
The Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act, commonly known as the SAFE-T Act, is a state of Illinois statute enacted in 2021 that makes a number of reforms to the criminal justice system, affecting policing, pretrial detention and bail, sentencing, and corrections. The Act's section on pretrial detention, which took effect in full on September 18, 2023, is also known as the Pretrial Fairness Act.
Eileen O'Neill Burke is an American lawyer, politician, and former judge serving Cook County State's Attorney since 2024. She was previously a justice on the Illinois First District Appellate Court and a judge on the Circuit Court of Cook County. Before that, she worked for a decade as a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer.
Voters in Cook County can turn to a few different resources, including a massive guide published by Injustice Watch. The interactive guide provides information on 75 circuit court judges and two appellate court judges that are running for retention or election to full terms in the area.
Injustice Watch's team of investigative reporters works to fill this gap by providing voters with nonpartisan information about Cook County judicial elections.
In Illinois, for example, the state supreme court suspended speedy trial rights in April 2020. Asked about reinstatement in June 2021 by Injustice Watch, a spokesperson for the court could not provide a timeline.
Organizations such as Injustice Watch have begun monitoring and reporting racist and violent social media posts made by law enforcement officers
In Philadelphia (where such a group of 72 Philadelphia police officers was uncovered), the Plain View Project revealed that of the 1,000 police profiles identified on Facebook, one in three had posted troubling content and of this third, one in three had had one or more federal civil rights suits filed against them.
