(The Center Square) – Cook County State’s attorney Kim Foxx, heavily criticized by critics as a soft-on-crime prosecutor, said Tuesday that she will not be seeking a third term in office in 2024.
“I leave now with my head held high, with my heart full,” Foxx said during a midday speech at the City Club of Chicago.
Foxx said she made new Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, whom she cast as the “man of the moment,” aware of her decision just hours before taking the stage to make her announcement.
“I told Mayor-elect Johnson as a Black man in leadership that his role would be very difficult,” she added. “You have to keep going. But know what’s coming. His responsibility is to do the work with the full knowledge that it’s not going to be fair … but he has a job to do and elevate the voices of the people who put him there.”
A native of Chicago who grew up in the notorious Cabrini Green public housing development, Foxx was swept into power in 2016 in the wake of the firestorm created by the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald and the cover-up that followed.
She easily bested then State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, marking the start of a tenure that frequently saw her publicly at odds with everyone from the Chicago Police Department and conservatives to now outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot over her policies, handling of certain high-profile cases and the city’s surging violent crime rate.
Depite the controversies, Foxx maintained a connection with Chicago’s voters, winning both her terms as the county’s top prosecutor despite growing pushback by critics who blasted many of her policies as too progressive and not enough about victims.
In becoming the first Black woman to ever occupy the seat, Foxx often talked about how being raised by a single mother while growing up in Cabrini Green shaped her vision of what she called a more equitable criminal justice system. Her approach of focusing on violent crime prosecutions over lower-level felonies and lesser crimes sparked much rancor.
On Tuesday, her remarks were delivered to a crowd that included staffers from her office, people who have been wrongfully convicted and Anjanette Young, the Chicago woman who was wrongly handcuffed while in the nude during a bungled police raid at her home.
“I’m really proud of the work that we have done on running the second largest prosecutor’s office in the middle of a pandemic and still doing the work,” she said. “And I work with a really incredible group of prosecutors who put this system on their back because the obligation to be ready for trial falls on us. And they’ve done that, whether it is getting a guilty (verdict) in the murder of Commander Paul Bauer or the murder of Tyshawn Lee or the countless other cases whose names don’t make headlines, our prosecutors are holding people accountable.”
Along the way, Foxx also instituted controversial standards for prosecutors looking to pursue felony charges for retail theft. She set off a growing campaign to expunge low-level marijuana convictions ahead of legalization across the state and established that attorneys from her office would no longer fight to keep all nonviolent defendants behind bars if they are unable to make bail.
Among Foxx’s most high-profile and controversial decisions was to drop all charges against former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, who claimed he was attacked in Chicago in 2019 by two men wearing red hats similar to the “Make America Great Again” hats worn by supporters of President Donald Trump. Smollett said he was targeted because he’s a famous Black actor who is openly gay. Chicago police spent about $130,000 in taxpayer resources investigating the report but found cooperating witnesses that testified Smollett paid them to attack him.
A grand jury indicted him on several charges, including filing false police reports, but Foxx later dropped the charges. A special prosecutor was later appointed, and Smollett was convicted of five of six charges against him.
In long pushing a more nuanced approach to crime fighting, Foxx was also one of a small number of local states’ attorneys to openly support the elimination of cash bail. The vast majority of Illinois states’ attorneys opposed ending cash bail, a measure that was blocked from being put into effect on New Year’s Eve 2022, hours before it was to take effect. The matter is still being settled in the courts.
All of the proposed changes made for some tumultuous times for Foxx, including in her office, where some of her own staffers openly disapproved of her approach. In the summer of 2022, veteran prosecutor Jim Murphy announced he was leaving and penned a scathing resignation letter detailing reasons for his exit.
Through it all, Foxx doesn’t seem to have many regrets, maintaining that she’s started to see a shift in the approach and attitudes of many of the attorneys she worked with.
“There’s a generational shift, I think,” she said, of the prosecutors now occupying the state’s attorneys’ office. “As a kid from the projects who lived in a bad neighborhood, I heard things that broke my heart. And these were people who were the good guys. And so, I mean, some people left early on, were encouraged to do so.”
