Electronic Monitoring under Scrutiny

Interesting developments?

• Cook County Chief Judge Charles S. Beach II yesterday issued his first public announcement since taking office Monday, unveiling a new committee that he said will urgently review how his office’s electronic monitoring program handles reported violations by people wearing ankle monitors.

  The move comes as scrutiny intensifies over the system’s failure to respond to multiple alerts it received in the days before 50-year-old Lawrence Reed set a woman on fire aboard a Blue Line train in the Loop last month.

  Beach’s statement offered a cautious but pointed acknowledgment that the court’s monitoring program needs clearer coordination and faster information sharing. Without referring to the Reed case specifically, Beach’s statement said recent events highlighted the need for well-defined roles among the agencies involved in pretrial supervision. Beach promised a transparent, evidence-based review that would result in concrete, actionable recommendations by late January.

We say "interesting" because this story also dropped yesterday:

• A year after Lacramioara Beldie was killed by her estranged husband, who’d been ordered to stay away, her family has sued Cook County and the company that operated his tracking device.

  In the months leading up to her death, Beldie received more than 20 calls and over 90 messages, alerting her that Constantin Beldie had violated his GPS monitoring, according to the lawsuit filed last month.

  But the court allegedly did nothing about these violations and, according to the suit, “intentionally disregarded the impending danger of Constantin Beldie and failed to act to prevent the attack and death of Lacramioara Beldie.”

  On Nov. 19, 2024, the tracking company did not issue any alert when Lacramioara Beldie’s husband showed up outside a Portage Park home and proceeded to stab her to death, according to the lawsuit. Constantin Beldie, 57, killed himself after the attack and was found inside a car a block away hours later.

This could be a real test of an effort to hold the failed EM policy to account seeing as how there were tens of dozens of provable violations of the monitoring....and exactly zero penalties against the future murderer.

We'll see.