The attack on Eileen O'Neill Burke is intended to discredit her, as she is a grave threat to the trial lawyers cash cow, the wrongful conviction racket, which has enriched both trial lawyers and criminal clients
On Thursday, March 12, a coalition of activists, lawmakers, and self‑described criminal justice reformers held a press conference accusing Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke of “turning a blind eye” to alleged ICE abuses during Operation Midway Blitz. The group is demanding a judge appoint a special prosecutor to the criminal division of the Cook County Circuit Court to investigate federal agents. Burke correctly labeled these demands “frivolous” and vowed to “strenuously oppose this petition.” This is only the latest attack on a prosecutor who has refocused the office on its core mission: constitutionally protecting the public.
Burke is a serious threat to Cook County’s powerful “Criminal Industrial Complex” (CIC) — a network of special interests that have turned “criminal justice reform” into a cash‑rich industry. This complex includes attorneys, advocacy organizations, university researchers, consultants, and consent‑decree monitors who have a growing financial interest in treating criminals like victims and police like criminals. For many involved with the CIC, this endeavor is not just a cause — it is a career, and for some, an extraordinarily lucrative one.
The mass‑exoneration machinery is the CIC’s golden goose. Between 2008 and 2024, Chicago has paid out more than $1.11 billion in police‑related verdicts and settlements, a staggering outlay driven in large part by wrongful‑conviction and misconduct cases. Many individuals exonerated under former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in cases tied to alleged police misconduct never had to prove factual innocence of the underlying crimes in an adversarial courtroom setting. Foxx’s office issued “certificates of innocence” at scale — prompting former Mayor Lori Lightfoot to accuse Foxx of “handing out COI’s like they’re candy” — which cleared the way for larger civil settlements and verdicts by designating these individuals as wrongfully convicted.
A federal judge has now ordered Foxx to testify in a wrongful‑conviction lawsuit and explain decisions she made after allegedly meeting privately with lawyers connected to an exoneration non-profit, which was intimately intertwined with a decidedly for profit private law firm that specializes in suing the City in wrongful conviction lawsuits. That deposition is a potentially pivotal step toward exposing the full extent of collusion between her office and attorneys who both pushed mass exonerations and then profited from the ensuing lawsuits. This emerging scrutiny may be the first real crack in a system that merged prosecution power, activist agendas, and civil litigation money in ways that have remained largely hidden from the public.
Burke has signaled a decisive break from these prosecutor‑driven mass exonerations, with the city facing potentially over $1 billion in additional settlement costs from hundreds of other cases involving individuals released by Foxx. O’Neill Burke has made it clear that claims of innocence must be litigated and proved case by case in court, rather than rushed through in bulk administrative deals negotiated behind closed doors. O’Neill Burke’s core message is simple: Justice must rest on evidence and due process, rather than blanket assumptions involving every conviction connected to an officer at the center of numerous cases is automatically invalid.
O’Neill Burke insisting on soberly reviewing each case individually has sent the CIC and its litigators into a panic. The CIC’s effort to mobilize outrage against Burke by claiming she has ignored possible ICE abuses is simply the latest tactic in a broader campaign to discredit her. In reality, as of February, Burke implemented a new charging protocol that explicitly allows her office to pursue felony charges against federal immigration (ICE) agents in use‑of‑force incidents, while establishing guidelines for independent evidence review.
In rolling out this protocol, Burke openly acknowledged the legal obstacles posed by the federal Supremacy Clause while being equally clear federal agents are not above the law. Her pledge to be guided by the law and the evidence in deciding whether to seek charges is publicly supported by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association. Raoul, in a statement emailed to The TRiiBE, affirmed his office had reviewed the protocol and “concur[s] with its conclusions and approach.”
Ignored in the attacks on O’Neill Burke is her role in finally bringing the city’s reduction in crime in line with the national trend. Requests for detainment while awaiting trial increased 70 percent her first year, while the jail population is higher than before the SAFE‑T Act, as Burke prioritized keeping violent criminals, domestic abusers, and serious gun offenders off the street without trampling on defendants’ constitutional rights.
Of the many noticeable improvements to the CCSAO under O’Neill Burke, her greatest impact is on the long‑neglected domestic violence side, which has seen the greatest increase in requests for incarceration while awaiting trial. In 2025, detentions for domestic violence surpassed 80 percent. To confront this disturbing trend, which O’Neill described as a “house on fire,” Burke created the Special Victims Bureau (SVB) to handle sensitive domestic violence cases like murder, sexual assault, and human trafficking, and the specialized “Domestic Violence Homicide Unit” to prosecute homicides.
Though framed as a plea for justice for ICE protesters, the petition is in reality a thinly veiled political maneuver aimed at undermining and ultimately replacing Burke at the ballot box. By falsely casting Burke as “soft” on charging federal agents, its backers seek to erode her credibility to pave the way for a return to the “glory days” of the Foxx administration, when murder convictions were cavalierly tossed aside and COI’s were handed out “like candy” --decisions that transformed convicted killers and their civil lawyers into multi-millionaires at the expense of Chicago taxpayers.
Chicago should expect this coalition to continue its attacks on O’Neill Burke and her office, accusing her of abandoning standards of fairness and of racial discrimination. Meanwhile, Toni Preckwinkle, who like her ally Mayor Brandon Johnson, has given Burke no credit for the significant reduction in violent crime, will find ways to undermine Burke through the budget, judges she controls, and their allies in the media — publishing outlandish stories that question Burke’s legal practices, judgment, ethics, and cast doubt on her personal integrity.
