During a budget hearing last month, State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke did not mince words when describing her office’s means to stay on top of rapidly developing forensic science and its impact on criminal cases.
“I would be remiss,” she told Cook County board members, “not to mention our glaring lack of forensic capability.”
In addition to evaluating DNA results and firearms analyses, prosecutors are often wading through hours of surveillance footage and cellphone records when trying cases. Burke even posited that trials could unfold without a single eyeball witness when crimes happen in plain view of cameras.
“Crime has changed. Everything has a forensics component. They can get DNA off of bullet shell casings,” she said. “All of this requires a forensics capability that we are lacking and that is unacceptable.”
The state’s attorney’s office, she contends, is the “only major city’s prosecutor office without a forensic unit.”
In evaluating Burke’s budget push, the Tribune surveyed prosecutor’s offices in major U.S. cities and found that such a setup — an in-house forensics unit — is rare outside of New York and Los Angeles.
In offices in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and the Bronx, though, multi-staff forensic units support prosecutors in using scientific evidence — offering a vision for the future of criminal prosecutions as science continues to change and develop, especially given the high stakes for getting it wrong.
“It is something that I cannot imagine a DA’s office 10 years from this time not having something like this,” said Tim Cruz, president of the National District Attorneys Association.
The Cook County Public Defender’s Office has a Forensic Science Division made up of five attorneys trained to provide expertise in forensic evidence to courtroom attorneys, but a spokesperson said that state-funded forensic resources are already “heavily weighted in favor of prosecutors.” The statement noted that unlike the state’s attorney’s office, public defenders don’t have access to an in-house scientist.
“While our office’s Forensic Science Division has been a critical resource for our attorneys to assist our clients, our attorneys cannot provide the same expert testimony that, for example, the prosecution uses the Illinois State Police Crime Lab for,” the statement said. “Instead, we must routinely spend additional funds to hire outside experts in DNA, fingerprint, and ballistics analysis in order to properly represent our clients and ensure equal access to justice for all Cook County residents.”
The state’s attorney’s office is in the process of building up a forensic personnel, according to staff, with the goal of centralizing some existing staff under one umbrella and adding new positions. The office recently hired a second DNA scientist after the role was vacant for a time.
Burke discussed her staffing goals during a presentation at a July 30 Cook County Board mid-year budget hearing, when she pitched commissioners on the offices’ need for “more manpower at all levels” in a sweeping proposal that will put her up against a former political opponent.
Not only would the unit look at digital evidence — she estimates the office has around 200,000 hours of video — but DNA and ballistics.
Forensic impact
Anyone who has seen an episode of “Law & Order” likely has a vision of how they believe DNA is processed in criminal cases. A lab tech runs the sample, and it’s a match.
Case closed.
The reality, experts say, is more complicated and ever-changing. (And DNA is often presented in terms of probabilities, rather than matches).
In 2014, Rachel Singer was hired by the Kings County district attorney’s office in Brooklyn, New York to start its forensic science unit, which now has seven staff members, including a DNA specialist, a chief and a deputy and four paralegals.
Singer, chief of the unit, said she and her staff help prosecutors review scientific evidence, draft motions and summations and prepare expert witnesses, among other functions, in order to ensure the assistant district attorneys understand what the evidence shows — or does not show — so prosecutors can put forward the best case possible and avoid inadvertently misapplying the evidence, a serious transgression.
This includes evidence such as DNA, fingerprints, trace evidence, serology and controlled substances.
“Very often our ADAs don’t know how to decipher the forensic reports to analyze whether their evidence is good, bad, how it will be useful for them in their trial,” Singer said.
If prosecutors get it wrong, she said, the case could get sent back on appeal, among other significant repercussions.
Singer said she can’t imagine the district attorney’s office not having this kind of support for line prosecutors. The use of formalized such units, though, does not appear to be widespread in large U.S. cities. Prosecutor’s offices in cities such as Philadelphia, Phoenix, Detroit and Baltimore told the Tribune that they do not have a dedicated forensic unit.
In the Bronx though, the district attorney’s office has an eight-person unit which includes a chief, deputy chief, supervisor, forensic analyst, forensic science coordinator, DNA specialist, NYPD crime lab liaison and a cold case investigator, according to a spokesperson.
In Los Angeles, the office has a dedicated forensic science section as part of its training division, according to a spokesperson.
Here in Cook County, the state’s attorney’s office has set its sights on a three-pronged unit that would encompass forensic science, trial technology and digital evidence, with the goal of someday building the office’s own digital lab.
With the 2026 budget in the balance, the office hopes to add attorneys, investigators and a firearms specialist to a crop of existing personnel that would be consolidated centrally, rather than allocated piecemeal across the office, according to staff.
“All of the disciplines that end up in criminal cases are very complicated, esoteric scientific disciplines,” said Richard Kling, a longtime defense attorney and professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology. “It’s beyond the understanding of most of us who practice law.”
Manpower challenge
Whether Burke gets that additional staff will depend on how much belt-tightening is necessary in Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s upcoming budget proposal. Preckwinkle forecast a $211 million deficit in June, but warned that federal funding changes might cut deeper. She makes her formal budget proposal on Oct. 9, which typically includes negotiations with other elected officials and commissioners.
In a June meeting with the Tribune’s editorial board, O’Neill Burke said “We’re both very pragmatic people. We both want efficient government. I don’t think anybody can contest that Toni is an excellent administrator and that she really runs a very, very large governmental organization extremely well,” she said.
“We’re pragmatic, we’re working together and we will continue to work together. We’re both professionals.”
This is a first as state’s attorney, with a former political opponent — Preckwinkle — largely in control of the purse strings. Former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, a protege of Preckwinkle, left the office with a $221 million budget for 2025 and a total headcount of about 1,440. That’s 37% more funding and about 80 more staff compared with 2020. Much of that increase came from grant funding.
Burke did not say how much more she was requesting for her first budget, and the county’s budget office declined to share it.
Echoing her campaign, Burke at times painted a grim portrait of staffing, telling county commissioners that the office also needs a major hiring push for assistant state’s attorneys and a revamp of its case management system. Several felony courtrooms only have two attorneys each, she said.
At “bare minimum,” Burke said, they need three. “Right now our priority has to be ASAs.”
“When I took on this job I knew that the state’s attorney’s office had serious problems,” she said. “That’s why I got into this.”
Kling noted that there are staffing shortages across the criminal justice system, including overburdened judges, foreign language interpreters and clerks.
“Clerks are way down. Translators are hard to find in courtrooms. The numbers of judges to handle cases are down and certainly the numbers of people in the state’s attorney’s office is down,” he said. “That affects the criminal justice system because it may mean less experienced trying cases or people who need more time to try cases.”
Burke talked frequently about the office’s “exodus” during the campaign. Foxx saw a surge of resignations during the pandemic, including veteran prosecutors and middle managers, that employees at the time said had drained morale and contributed to a backlog of cases.
Before Foxx left, she gave ASAs raises of at least 10% and implemented two $5,000 retention bonuses for frontline attorneys.
Those exits have slowed, but were still affecting the office’s operations, Burke told commissioners. Given current turnover, she said she would need to hire 150 attorneys next year to stay ahead.
The office in recent years has sometimes struggled to hire or retain paralegals or attorneys, she said, with many being lured away by higher salaries in big law firms, or the union protection and higher salaries at the county public defender’s office.
In a statement to the Tribune, Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr., said the office has hired only one paralegal from the state’s attorney’s office since 2023 and no attorneys from the office since 2021.
After filling dozens of roles with new bar takers earlier this month, the office is now down from about 130 vacancies to 100 vacancies, according to the county’s budget office.
