CJP 2015 FOIA Campaign: This is our fourth request under Illinois’ FOIA to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office – this requests seeks data related to their felony review process.
Below is the content of our fourth request for information from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO) under Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office is the main target of CJP’s 2015 FOIA Campaign. This request was filed on July 7, 2015.
FOIA Content
All data maintained in the your Crimes database for all case submitted to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office for felony review in the year of 2013.
- This data should have identifying information regarding the crime victim(s) and witness(es) removed prior to release.
- If there is a relationship between the offender and the victim please also remove this information
- If there is no relationship between the offender and the victim please detail that information.
The SAO was incredibly quick with their denial of our request, it is dated July 9, 2015. You can read their response in full here. The reasons they stated for the denial are:
Overly Burdensome
- Would have to hand count 30,000 pone calls
- 9,000 documents
It seems that either the SAO does not have a case management system where this data is maintained or they are being dishonest in their response and using an untrue fact like “we keep all our records on paper” to refuse to provide CJP the data we are requesting.
