Both seeking Democratic nomination to replace Kim Foxx following her two terms in office.
Clayton Harris III and retired Appellate Judge Eileen O'Neill Burke are opponents in the Cook County state's attorney race.
Cook County State’s candidate Clayton Harris III, center, talks with Miguel d’Escoto, left, and Marcello Gulotta before speaking at the City Club in Chicago on March 7, 2024. Democratic candidate Eileen O’Neill Burke answers questions from the media after her Cook County State’s Attorney debate with Clayton Harris at ABC7 Chicago on Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024.
The intraparty fight came to represent a struggle that exists within the Democratic Party as a whole as progressives have pushed harder to reform government systems they believe are fundamentally flawed while less-progressive Democrats fear those reforms might go too far, too fast. The next state’s attorney, he said, had to change the perception of how aggressively the office has and will prosecute cases so “that people know that we take crime seriously, that we’re not living in a lawless society.”
Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, who endorsed O’Neill Burke, said at her campaign party, “when it comes to people doing carjackings that go with zero accountability or gun violence with zero accountability, I want that to stop.” But Harris and supporters seized on the contributions and Catanzara’s support as a signal she would be “beholden” to extreme interests and would undo reforms made during Foxx’s time as state’s attorney.,” Harris allies painted her handling of a prosecution of a Black child in the early 1990s as a signal she represented a return to the days when the office prioritized securing convictions over delivering justice.
But earlier this week Foxx in an interview with the Tribune said O’Neill Burke’s response to the case reemerging — including recent comments in which O’Neill Burke said she believed the boy “had something to do with it” — were a reflection that she had failed to fully grapple with the county’s history of wrongful convictions.
In a bid to stem attrition, O’Neill Burke promoted creating a felony prosecution bureau for hard-charting trial attorneys and a separate restorative justice bureau for juvenile, drug and mental-health related cases to get “people back on track” and capture lawyers seeking careers in public interest law. An education and ethics unit with retired judges also would provide ongoing training.
He left the office for the same reason he came back to run it: “It was taxing to just see Black men coming through the system constantly. Period. Just Black men,” he told the Tribune in November.
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