Cook County Jail policies for inmate ID and property retention parsed at Seventh Circuit

CHICAGO (CN) — Former inmates of the Cook County Jail in Chicago took the county sheriff’s office before the Seventh Circuit on Wednesday over the practice of retaining and eventually destroying inmates’ state IDs when they transfer to a Department of Corrections facility.

Former Cook County Jail inmates say in two separate federal cases that the sheriff’s office didn’t hand over their IDs to the Illinois Department of Corrections when they were relocated to facilities operated by the department. Instead the sheriff retained the IDs pursuant to an internal policy, and marked them eligible for destruction several weeks after no one came to claim them. Several plaintiffs also accuse the sheriff of illegally holding on to other personal property items for years after their release, only returning the items during litigation.

These inmates claim the sheriff’s actions — not turning over their IDs to the state corrections department and in some cases destroying the IDs after several weeks — violated their property and due process rights under the Fourth, Fifth and 14th Amendments.

“The principle is that you can’t tell somebody ‘you’re going to forfeit your property if you don’t pick it up within 60 days.’ That’s not the same as an intelligent, knowing waiver; an abandonment,” the inmates’ attorney Kenneth Flaxman told a Seventh Circuit panel on Wednesday.

These complaints are not the first time the Cook County Sheriff’s Office has been accused of illegally destroying or retaining county jail inmates’ property. Plaintiffs in a 2007 complaint said they were aware of over 23,000 inmate property bags at the jail which had gone missing, though a jury ultimately ruled in the sheriffs’ favor. Jail support activists outside the county jail during 2020 Black Lives Matter protests also noted multiple people who had not received their IDs, money or personal items upon release.

The case history for these particular complaints stretches back to November 2017, when a former Cook County inmate named Leoncio Elizarri filed a class action against the county and sheriff’s office claiming officials had illegally retained his ID, phone, social security card, bus pass, pocket money and several pieces of jewelry after he left the county jail. Two more former inmates with similar claims joined the case over the next four years, and another group of former inmates filed a sister federal complaint against the sheriff in April 2022.

Flaxman represents both groups, but U.S. District Judge Steven Seeger denied the sheriff’s motion to consolidate their cases. He found combining the complaints would upend proceedings in the older case, essentially “hitting a reset button.”

Instead Seeger and fellow U.S. District Judge Jeremy Daniel separately sided with the sheriff’s office in August 2023 and January 2024, respectively; Seeger granting summary judgment and Daniel dismissing the 2022 plaintiffs’ claims. The judges both found the former inmates’ grievances didn’t amount to constitutional violations, citing, among other arguments, Seventh Circuit precedent which defends “reasonable” seizure of inmates’ property and the limits of 14th Amendment protection.

“The Constitution did not require the sheriff to ship the property to the Illinois Department of Corrections … The 14th Amendment requires notice and an opportunity for retrieval before destroying personal property. But the Constitution does not require transportation services, or free shipping,” Seeger wrote in his August 2023 opinion.

Seeger also noted in his opinion that in the course of litigating the 2017 case, the sheriff’s office returned the confiscated property of two of the plaintiffs, including Elizarri.

“On this record, the sheriff would not have committed a constitutional injury even if he had destroyed their property. So it is hard to see how the plaintiffs could have suffered an injury when they got their property back,” the judge quipped.

Both sets of plaintiffs appealed, hoping to have their cases reinstated — and in the 2017 plaintiffs’ case, to have a new judge certify their proposed putative class.

Across two distinct but back-to-back oral argument sessions on Wednesday, Flaxman stressed the importance of law enforcement upholding property rights in the U.S. legal system. He even alluded to pre-Civil War cases dealing with sheriffs’ responsibility to care for escaped slaves to emphasize his point.

“If we go back and look at the historical record of sheriffs who seize property, there’s an understanding that they would hold on to it and take good care of it. Many of those cases are difficult to cite because they involve the capturing of slaves,” he said.

Though U.S. law no longer legally recognizes people as property, Flaxman said many states still hold law enforcement responsible for caring for property in their custody.

“In this case we’re pressing that there’s no rational basis for the sheriff’s policy,” Flaxman added while arguing for the 2017 plaintiffs.

In both cases the judges on the appellate panel echoed some of the lower court’s concerns. U.S. Circuit Judge Doris Pryor, a Joe Biden appointee, pressed Flaxman to point to exactly when the plaintiffs suffered a constitutional violation at the sheriff’s hands. He responded that the Fourth and Fifth Amendment breaches occur when the inmates’ property is destroyed, a point complicated by the fact that two of his clients had their property returned.

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Sykes, a George W. Bush appointee, also pointed to prior Seventh Circuit rulings which found government bodies could be justified destroying property which had been abandoned.

Pryor and fellow U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Brennan, a Donald Trump appointee, asked the sheriff’s office attorney Jessica Wasserman why the sheriff couldn’t simply send inmates’ IDs to the state corrections department upon transfer. Wasserman at first sidestepped their questions by pointing out inmates signed forms acknowledging that their property would be destroyed if it wasn’t collected.

“The government had no reason to think plaintiff even wanted the property. Even assuming it’s a minimal cost to ship the property, there’s no reason to ship property that has been abandoned and that the government has no indication that anyone wants,” Wasserman said.

Pryor pushed for an answer on why the sheriff’s office doesn’t transfer IDs specifically to the state corrections department. Wasserman responded by claiming potential issues could arise with storage space for inmates’ property; issues which she said the sheriff’s office policy helped alleviate.

“I think it just comes down to the fact that, unless they are told there is some reason that the individual wants this document, there is no rationale for them to go through the effort of transporting it,” Wasserman said.

Pryor rebutted that the state corrections department itself has stated its willingness to accept Cook County inmates’ IDs. Wasserman, in response, echoed the lower courts’ assertion that even if the policy negatively impacted the plaintiffs, they hadn’t shown how it rose to a violation of fundamental rights.

The panel took the case under advisement but didn’t say when it would issue a ruling.

Follow @djbyrnes1