Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s office is tightening its electronic monitoring rules to clarify that apartment dwellers in the program cannot do things like get mail from their building’s vestibule or use a basement laundry room.
The revisions follow an Illinois appellate ruling last month that slammed Dart for “ambiguity” on whether residents of multi-unit buildings can be in common spaces for such “activities of daily living.” The three-judge panel threw out an escape conviction of a South Side man imprisoned nearly five years for that felony after sheriff’s investigators did not find him in the apartment where he lived on home detention with an ankle bracelet. The man said he was showering at his sister’s unit — elsewhere in the building — and believed Dart’s electronic monitoring terms allowed it.
