Timothy Evans is voted out as Cook County chief judge — by his peers

In the end, it was Timothy Evans’ peers who decided his time was up as chief judge in Cook County.

In a surprise, Evans lost his bid for a ninth term in that role when fellow Cook County Circuit Court judges voted for Charles Beach — 27 years Evans’ junior — to fill the critical post.

We’ll see whether there are any significant changes to the policies Evans was instrumental in establishing, which generally emphasized the rights of criminal defendants over the objections of voices calling for more people charged with violent crimes to be taken off the streets.

From our vantage point, while the 82-year-old Evans’ career as a Chicago public servant (including as Mayor Harold Washington’s floor leader in City Council during the Council Wars era) was extraordinarily lengthy and full of fascinating twists and turns, it was time for a new boss. And we will observe with keen interest how the Cook County bench functions with the 55-year-old Beach in charge — and particularly what changes.

After all, under the state’s landmark SAFE-T Act, the role of judges in Cook County — always important — became even more critical to maintaining public safety. With the 2023 elimination of cash bail — and Evans was a key player in that policy change with his order in 2017 that judges not set bail at so high a level that defendants couldn’t afford it — it is solely up to the judge whether to detain someone accused of a felony while they await trial.

The alternative to incarceration is mainly home confinement, with ankle monitors enabling law enforcement to keep tabs on defendants’ whereabouts. Before and since the end of cash bail, the not-infrequent cases of people on ankle monitors being accused of committing violent crimes even while awaiting trial on previous accusations have stoked more controversy about the growing practice.

The pressure on the chief judge’s office only intensified with Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s decision early this year to phase out the sheriff’s electronic monitoring program and centralize it with the chief judge. Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, a critic of over-reliance on ankle monitors, expressed concern at the time about how capable Evans’ office was to handle the responsibility.

When he assumes office Dec. 1, Beach will have that challenge on his plate, plus management of a workforce close to 3,000 and a budget of $368 million. The office is responsible also for administering the juvenile detention center, adult and juvenile probation, and the public guardian’s office, among other things.

Judges vote every three years on who will be chief judge, and we wonder what changed between 2022, when Evans ran unopposed, and now, when he faced two challengers and ended up unseated by a convincing 144-109 vote. In 2022, more than a few moderate Democratic officeholders in Cook County, angry at the crime surge at the time, urged voters not to retain Evans as a judge, including Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, and Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, both of whom serve parts of downtown Chicago. Even then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot hinted that voters ought to move on from the Evans era.

He kept his seat with more than 69% voting to retain him, easily topping the 60% he needed.

Beach and other judges, speaking after this most recent election, were careful to praise Evans for his leadership over the years and attributed the outcome only generally to the need for change. Much of Beach’s campaign was focused on judges’ day-to-day work lives, including heightened concerns about their personal safety. Beach has been a judge only for eight years, so this truly is a changing of the guard.

More transparency out of the chief judge’s office, never something Evans was known for, will be an important part of Beach’s record.

But judges’ performance in keeping Chicagoans and suburbanites safe while respecting the rights of criminal defendants is mostly how Beach will be judged in the court of public opinion. The balance between those two concerns isn’t easy to strike. But that’s the system we have now. The SAFE-T Act gives judges immense responsibilities, and each judge now is one pretrial-release horror story away from incurring voters’ wrath.

In Chicago, we have an able superintendent of police in Larry Snelling, an excellent Cook County state’s attorney in O’Neill Burke and now the first new Cook County chief judge in 24 years. We hope Chicagoans can look back on this important change as akin to the same breath of fresh air that Snelling and O’Neill Burke brought to the vital issue of public safety.

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