Cook County voters choosing top prosecutor to succeed Kim Foxx

Eight years after Kim Foxx rode a wave of voter outrage over the police murder of Laquan McDonald to take over the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, voters took to the polls Tuesday to choose her successor: a former prosecutor who’d worked in courtrooms for her entire career, or a former alderman and longtime defense attorney.

A Chicago native raised in a family of police officers, Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke became an assistant state’s attorney in 1991, staying for a decade and working on juvenile cases, appeals and felony review. She left, transitioning to criminal defense until 2008, when she ran for judge on the county’s Circuit Court. In 2016, she ran unopposed for the Illinois Appellate Court, where she remained until stepping down for her bid to become the county’s top prosecutor.

Her Republican opponent is personal injury attorney Bob Fioretti, the former 2nd Ward alderman who ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for state’s attorney in 2020.

Cook County voters last elected a Republican to the post in 1992, when Jack O’Malley won.

Either candidate would be a departure from Foxx, the first Black woman to run the office and one of the faces of the national progressive prosecutor movement. She oversaw several reforms to the office that eventually led to the elimination of cash bail across the state and a precipitous drop in the county’s jail population.

Foxx’s leadership was a focal point in the primary and general election campaigns. O’Neill Burke and Fioretti both said they would tweak Foxx’s reform policies, which they said failed to address a spike in crime during the pandemic.

O’Neill Burke leaned on her three decades in the courtroom and sharp criticism of Foxx’s leadership throughout the race. Under Foxx, she said, the office was suffering from “severe” morale and attrition problems — with several exits fueled by the pandemic and, O’Neill Burke said, prosecutors being forced to take on unsustainable caseloads to make up the difference.

Fear of crime also created an exodus of residents and businesses from Chicago, she said.

“Having no consequences is not working,” O’Neill Burke told the Tribune Editorial Board during the primary, pledging to more aggressively prosecute gun possession, carjacking, robbery and theft.

She faced Clayton Harris III in the Democratic primary. A fellow former prosecutor who left the office after roughly four years and went on to work in intergovernmental affairs for Mayor Richard M. Daley and Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Harris also managed the state’s International Port District.

A lecturer on race and policing at the University of Chicago, Harris said he ran, in part, to address the continued churn of Black men in the criminal justice system. He had the backing of the Cook County Democratic Party as well as County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Foxx’s political mentor.

Both seized on reporting about O’Neill Burke’s prosecution of an 11-year-old Black boy early in her career — and her subsequent response after the case resurfaced — as a signal of how she might take the office backwards.

But O’Neill Burke embraced many progressive reforms, including for the state’s landmark SAFE-T Act, which eliminated the use of cash bail and put the onus on prosecutors to request that the accused stay behind bars. She also applauded Foxx’s restorative justice efforts and said she would keep steering certain nonviolent or first-time offenders to diversionary courts.

While O’Neill Burke and Harris aligned on several issues, she took a more rigid stance on prosecutions, proposing a blanket policy for requesting detention for certain crimes — including possession of assault weapons, attacks on the CTA, or if a weapon is used in a forcible felony.

Prosecutors already regularly file detention petitions on offenses similar to those O’Neill Burke would seek detention for, but under Foxx, assistant state’s attorneys look at case-specific factors and request detention only if the accused are considered a flight risk or pose a threat to public safety. In the end, judges decide.

While Foxx opted not to pursue felony prosecutions of retail thefts unless stolen goods were worth more than $1,000, O’Neill Burke said she would bring that threshold back down to the state’s benchmark, $300. “Not prosecuting crime doesn’t deter crime. It encourages crime,” O’Neill Burke said.

On retail thefts, Foxx launched the $1000 threshold as one of several ways the office would de-emphasize prosecution of low-level crimes and focus resources on more serious offenses instead. Many neighboring states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana all had higher thresholds than Illinois, Foxx noted.

Harris said O’Neill Burke’s commitment to lowering the threshold again amounted to “pandering” to business leaders. And many business leaders stepped up to support O’Neill Burke’s campaign, with several contributing in excess of $100,000 ahead of the primary. She ended up carrying most of Cook County outside majority-Black precincts, according to a WBEZ analysis of the primary results. She also ran away with the vote in traditionally more conservative neighborhoods on the Northwest and Southwest sides of the city and in northwest and southwest suburban Cook County, as well as downtown Chicago.

Though Republicans held out for a “lightning strike” success for Fioretti, the general election was sleepier: lacking televised debates, major ad blitzes or controversy.

Even so, Fioretti sought to draw contrasts with O’Neill Burke and appeal to GOP voters, promising “to remove violent illegal alien criminals from our streets and neighborhoods,” and blaming some of the city’s crime surge on migrants.

He also cast doubt on election authorities in the waning days of the election, joining the state GOP to sue the city’s board of elections in a bid to have some mail ballots set aside and counted separately, arguing a line that denoted where voters could write their party affiliation during the primary was confusing and presented an opportunity for election workers to discriminate against Republicans. A judge denied their request for a temporary restraining order Tuesday, which the group plans to appeal.

Further down ballot, voters will also decide on the next county clerk — the office responsible for suburban elections, vital and property records, and legislative proceedings. Democrat Monica Gordon, a member of the Cook County Board chosen to run for the post after Clerk Karen Yarbrough’s death, has the upper hand: The office has been led by a Democrat for more than a century. Republican Monica Pennington, a real estate investor, and Libertarian paralegal Christopher Laurent are also running.

It’s a similar dynamic for Circuit Court clerk, the massive bureaucratic office that oversees records for the county’s unified court system, which has been led by Democrats since 1974. Mariyana Spyropoulos, an attorney who currently sits on the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, won the party’s nod and defeated incumbent Circuit Court Clerk Iris Martinez. She faces Republican Lupe Aguirre, a Chicago police officer, and Libertarian Michael Murphy.

Larry Rogers Jr., a longtime commissioner on the Cook County Board of Review that considers property tax appeals, is also seeking to extend his two-decade run representing the third district. Both he and Libertarian candidate Nico Tsatsoulis have highlighted their opposition to Assessor Fritz Kaegi, whose office values properties across the county. Rogers has said he might challenge Kaegi in 2026 or fund another candidate who would.