Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke is keeping a controversial campaign pledge to get tough on people accused of possessing machine guns, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found.

Soon after taking office Dec. 1, O’Neill Burke said her prosecutors would seek pretrial detention for anyone charged with possession of a machine gun or an extended magazine — asking judges to keep them in jail while they await trial.

She pointed to a “15-fold” increase in recoveries of weapons with illegal machine-gun conversion devices since 2019 in Chicago. Forty of the devices had been recovered in 2019. That figure rose to 604 in 2024, according to federal statistics.

The Sun-Times examined detention decisions involving machine-gun cases since the state’s Pre-Trial Fairness Act took effect in

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