CHICAGO — Cook County voters have decided to keep Circuit Judge Teresa Molina-Gonzalez on the bench for another six years, even though one of her pretrial release decisions became one of the most criticised court rulings in Chicago in years. CBS News Chicago reported that about 71 percent of voters marked "yes" on her retention question in the Tuesday, November 3 election — comfortably above the 60 percent a Cook County judge needs to stay in office. The results were still unofficial on Thursday, with election officials continuing to process outstanding ballots, but her margin was well clear of the threshold.

Source: CBS News Chicago

Molina-Gonzalez was one of 60 Cook County circuit judges facing retention votes this year, according to the Illinois Policy Institute's voter guide. Retention elections have no opponent: voters simply answer yes or no on whether a sitting judge should serve another term. Most judges pass easily, which is why the attention on her race stood out — hers was watched because of a single defendant, Lawrence Reed, and what prosecutors say he did three months after she released him.

Source: Illinois Policy Institute

The August 2025 hearing that defined the race

In August 2025, Reed, now 50, appeared before Molina-Gonzalez charged in Cook County with aggravated battery, after he allegedly attacked a social worker at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, a suburb just west of Chicago. Prosecutors asked the judge to keep him detained before trial, arguing he was a danger to the public. She refused and ordered him released on electronic monitoring instead. A transcript of the hearing reported by CWBChicago recorded her telling prosecutors, "I can't keep everybody in jail because the state's attorney wants me to." Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke later said publicly that her office had sought detention and the judge denied the request.

Source: Absolute News / CWBChicago reporting

Reporting by CWBChicago and the Chicago Tribune put Reed's record at more than 70 arrests in Cook County and a long history of mental illness — a record prosecutors said they put before the judge at the detention hearing. Those figures are from news reporting of court records; Reed's full criminal history has not been published as a single official document. What is not disputed is the sequence: detention was sought, detention was denied, and Reed went home with an ankle monitor under the county's electronic monitoring programme, which is run by the office of the Cook County chief judge.

The monitoring alerts, and the night of November 17, 2025

Court filings by pretrial services staff, reported by CWBChicago and summarised in Chicago Tribune coverage, described repeated monitoring problems in the days before the attack. Reed was away from home in violation of his curfew from the evening of Friday, November 14, 2025 until the next morning, the filings said. On Monday, November 17, he was away from home for virtually the entire day. The chief judge's office reported receiving a first notice of the violation at 9:13 that morning and an escalated alert three hours later; a second escalated alert came at 12:13 a.m. on November 18 — about three hours after the attack on the train.

Federal prosecutors allege that on the night of November 17, 2025, Reed approached 26-year-old Bethany MaGee aboard an O'Hare-bound CTA Blue Line train in downtown Chicago, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. She escaped the train at the Clark/Lake station and was taken to Stroger Hospital with serious injuries, where she remained for months before being released in February. Reed was arrested after the attack. All of this remains allegation: Reed has pleaded not guilty, and the charges have not been proven at trial.

Source: Absolute News

Why the case became a referendum on pretrial release

The case landed in the middle of Illinois' continuing argument over the SAFE-T Act, the state law that ended cash bail and rebuilt pretrial detention around judicial decisions about risk rather than money. Supporters of the law say detention decisions must be individual and evidence-based, and that a judge cannot jail every defendant a prosecutor asks her to jail. Critics, including State's Attorney Burke, argued after the attack that the system had been warned about this defendant specifically — and that electronic monitoring, as then run, did not act on its own alerts fast enough to protect the public.

The Chicago Council of Lawyers, whose evaluations are a standard reference in Cook County judicial elections, rated Molina-Gonzalez "Qualified" for retention. Its report noted she was admitted to the Illinois bar in 2001, served as a Cook County assistant state's attorney from 2001 to 2016 and as chief of prosecutions for the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation's real estate division from 2016 to 2019, and has sat as a circuit judge since July 2019, elected to a full term in 2020 and currently assigned to the Fourth Municipal District. The council described her as a hard-working judge with good legal ability.

Source: Chicago Council of Lawyers evaluation

What happens next

The retention results will be certified once remaining ballots are processed; with a margin near 71 percent, certification is not expected to change the outcome. Separately, Reed's federal case continues: a court has ordered a competency evaluation to decide whether he is mentally capable of standing trial, and his next hearing is scheduled for November 12. For Chicago's large Punjabi and South Asian community — and for every commuter who rides the Blue Line to O'Hare or downtown jobs — the two tracks of this story now run in parallel: a judge voters chose to keep, and a prosecution that will test, in open court, what happened on that train and in the monitoring office in the hours before it.