On December 31, 2023, Joe Mahr and Megan Crepeau released an article on the progress Cook County has made in delivering speedier justice titled, “Stalled justice: Slow Cook County courts see progress in 2023, but some decade-old cases still linger on dockets.” Since the reforms made in the fall, Mahr and Crepeau report, the number of cases that are completed within Cook County’s two-year goal has gone from 1 in 10 to 1 in 9. Prosecutors now have to give the defence evidence they want to present in the early-stage hearing if they want to jail the defendant until trial. There are more staff members, stricter rules, new technology is being used to share evidence faster, and judges are more aggressively setting deadlines and questioning delays. The total of pending cases since the height of the pandemic has gone down from 41,000 to 28,000.

There are still many problems. In the mid-2000s, Cook County was able to complete most of their cases within two years. As stated above, only 1 in 9 cases are now completed within Cook County’s two-year goal. This is better than 1 in 10, which is what it was in 2022, but the greater trend is one of delay rather than of progression to steady timeliness. Mahr and Crepeau most strongly emphasise the systemic problem in the Cook County Justice system. The Cook County justice system has a history of getting “jammed at every turn,” responding in kind with half-hearted reforms. The fear is that the current reforms are only crisis-generated responses and that Cook County courts will not make long-lasting systemic solutions to the problems of delay and only go so far as to reduce the backlog to an acceptable level – for now.