In a staunch and unequivocal defense of how Chicago police handled Laquan McDonald’s murder, a Cook County judge acquitted three officers Thursday of charges alleging they conspired to justify the shooting by falsifying reports and claiming the teen was the aggressor.
At every point in her hourlong ruling, Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson endorsed the actions of the police on the night McDonald was shot by Officer Jason Van Dyke, calling the 17-year-old an erratic, armed assailant who ignored commands to drop a small knife. She also said it would be wrong to second-guess the actions of the police — including Van Dyke, who is scheduled to be sentenced Friday for his historic conviction for second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.
“It is clear from the testimony in this case that an officer could reasonably believe that an attack was imminent based upon McDonald’s actions,” said Stephenson, reading from a 28-page ruling in her packed courtroom. “… Only the officers involved in the incident know what their belief was at the time of the incident. We cannot now view the actions of the officers with the benefit of hindsight as to what they should have believed.”
In a written message to the Tribune on Thursday evening, McDonald’s sister, Tariana, said the judge’s finding has not changed her mind that the officers tried to cover up what happened to her older brother.
“I am truly hurt,” the 18-year-old wrote in her first public comments. “Words couldn’t explain how hurt I still am. … Not only did I lose a brother, I lost my best friend. People don’t understand how I feel not to be able to talk to my brother, let alone see him again. That’s why I feel like justice should be served.”
In acquitting retired Detective David March, ex-patrolman Joseph Walsh and Officer Thomas Gaffney of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice, Stephenson rejected the prosecution’s case with a witness-by-witness takedown. She dismantled the crucial testimony of a Chicago police officer who alleged her statements about the shooting were falsified — and said she faced retribution from colleagues as a result. The judge also dismissed the account of a civilian eyewitness who said he was shooed away from the shooting scene.
Stephenson, who is a former Cook County prosecutor, also downplayed the importance of the now-infamous police dashboard video of the shooting, saying it did not capture the perspective of the officers.
The court-ordered release of the video more than a year after the October 2014 shooting led to months of protests and political upheaval, and prompted a federal investigation of the Police Department that concluded officers routinely violated the civil rights of minorities.
While Van Dyke’s trial centered on his actions on the night of the shooting, the conspiracy case has been seen as a referendum on a so-called code of silence within the Chicago Police Department designed to protect fellow officers from accountability for wrongdoing. The indictment by a special grand jury was believed to be the first time any Chicago police officer has faced criminal charges stemming from an alleged cover-up of an on-duty shooting.
As Stephenson concluded her remarks Thursday, scattered applause arose in the courtroom gallery from supporters of the officers. When court adjourned, the defendants smiled and shook hands with their lawyers. Walsh, who was Van Dyke’s partner the night of the shooting, stretched his arm around his attorney Thomas Breen and patted him on the back.
Later, in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Walsh stood next to his attorney in front of a wall of television news cameras. At first he declined to comment on the ruling. But when asked about the last 18 months under indictment, he said, “heart-wrenching.”
“Heartbreaking for my family,” said Walsh, his jaw clenching as he stepped up to the microphones. “A year and a half … I have nothing else to say.”
Another Walsh attorney, Todd Pugh, slammed the evidence presented by special prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes, saying the charges should never have been brought.
“They say a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, and that’s what happened in this case,” he said.
Gaffney, among the first officers on the scene that night, has been on desk duty since the indictment came down but will be reinstated to full duties given the acquittal, a police spokesman said Thursday. March and Walsh resigned after the city inspector general’s office released a report recommending they be fired for their actions in the McDonald investigation.
The ruling stunned members of McDonald’s family and angered many community leaders who called for protests and political action. The Rev. Marvin Hunter, McDonald’s great-uncle, was visibly shaken by the acquittals and called on the federal government to investigate the Cook County criminal justice system for what he called its systemic corruption.
“This is not justice,” Hunter told reporters. “I think this judge had it made up in her mind … to make sure that these gentlemen never see the inside of a jail cell.”
Before the officers left the courthouse, activist William Calloway, who fought to get the dashboard camera video released and is running for city alderman, slammed the judge’s decision as a farce and suggested her background as a prosecutor made her prone to believe whatever police say.
“That blue code of silence isn’t just with the Chicago Police Department,” Calloway said. “It expands to the judicial system, and this is an example of that. …We know that this was a cover-up. We know these officers conspired to attempt to make sure Jason Van Dyke didn’t get tried for the murder.”
Attorney James McKay, who represented March, called those allegations “baloney.”
“This is criminal court, all right?” McKay said. “Where the rules of evidence and Illinois law is followed. With a burden of proof. You can say whatever you want on the street. But in a courtroom you better have evidence when you bring a case, and if you don’t, shame on you.”
McKay also said the case should never have been brought.
“(The officers) never should’ve been here. Never,” he said. “The truth happened in that courtroom. This case wasn’t even close. And three innocent men had to be put through hell. These three men were innocent from day one.”
Holmes, meanwhile, defended the credibility of the evidence, telling reporters she hopes the case “has been a crack in the wall of the code of silence.”
Assistant special prosecutor Ronald Safer rejected Stephenson’s assertion that the officers’ reports may not have lined up with the video because the video didn’t show their perspective.
“Everybody has seen that video,” Safer said. “The police reports that the police officers submitted painted a picture that was totally different from what was in the video.”
Stephenson’s ruling clearly pleased Kevin Graham, president of the police union that represents rank-and-file officers, who called the charges “trumped up” and slammed the news media — particularly the Chicago Tribune — for “relentless and baseless” coverage that he said has led to a “chilling effect” and low morale for officers.
“Let me be clear, there was no code of silence,” Graham said.
Stephenson’s highly anticipated ruling, which came more than a month after closing arguments and two unexplained delays, put in stark relief the difficulties in trying to prove criminal charges alleging a code of silence, requiring evidence that the officers conspired together to hide misconduct by an officer.
The decision is sure to cause backlash from critics who believe Stephenson’s background as a prosecutor makes her biased toward the police — a common complaint about judges at the county’s main criminal courthouse. Indeed, it was the latest in a string of high-profile trials in which Chicago police officers accused of wrongdoing were cleared by judges at the courthouse.
In 2015, Judge Diane Gordon Cannon cleared Cmdr. Glenn Evans of charges he shoved his gun down a man’s throat and threatened to kill him. The judge largely discounted seemingly strong evidence showing the man’s DNA on Evans’ gun.
That same year, Detective Dante Servin was acquitted by Judge Dennis Porter of all charges in an off-duty, late-night shooting in which he opened fire after alleging a man made a threatening motion at him with an object he took to be a gun, only to fatally shoot Rekia Boyd, an innocent young woman standing nearby. The object turned out to be a cellphone, authorities said.
Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor who is running for mayor, said Thursday that the verdict did not surprise her given the track record of prosecuting police officers at the courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue. Lightfoot noted that Stephenson and McKay worked closely together in the state’s attorney’s office earlier in their careers.
“You’ve got a judge who is a former prosecutor who was trial partners, as I understand it, with one of the defense attorneys,” Lightfoot said. “So it doesn’t terribly surprise me, but it absolutely disappoints me.”
Unlike Van Dyke’s trial, which unfolded in an intense atmosphere and drew news media from across the country, the conspiracy case was decidedly more low-key, centering mostly on dry police reports and other documents produced in the investigation of McDonald’s killing.
During the trial, Holmes and her team repeatedly alleged that the dashcam video was all the evidence needed to show that the officers’ police reports painting McDonald as the aggressor were patently false.
The camera footage shows McDonald walking south on Pulaski Road holding a folding knife in his right hand. Van Dyke, with Walsh close behind, exited his squad car, stepped toward the teen and opened fire within seconds, shooting McDonald 16 times, including at least 12 shots while the teen laid prone on the street.
March, who headed up the investigation, wrote reports stating McDonald had attacked officers before Van Dyke opened fire, while Gaffney and Walsh each submitted tactical response and battery reports claiming they had been assaulted by the teen.
“This should have been a homicide investigation,” Safer said in closing arguments in December. “Instead, Detective March shaped it from the first minute as an aggravated battery investigation with the soon-to-be deceased as the perpetrator … and the officers — including the officer who killed him — as the victims.”
Attorneys for the three officers ridiculed the case as weak and politically motivated, brought by a special prosecutor in the midst of the ongoing fallout over McDonald’s killing after the court-ordered release of the dashcam video caused a political firestorm.
One of the trial’s key witnesses was Officer Dora Fontaine, who testified for prosecutors that March fabricated statements attributed to her saying that McDonald had tried to attack the police with the knife.
“I started cursing, saying what the f—,” Fontaine said of her reaction when March’s report was made public in December 2015. “I was upset because I had not said that. … It was a lie.”
Fontaine said her denials made her an outcast in her own department. Some called her a rat, a traitor and a snitch, she said, and implied they wouldn’t back her up on the street. The situation became so fraught that, she said, her supervisors pulled her from patrol and assigned her to paid desk duty.
“If I was at a call and I needed assistance, some officers felt strong enough to say that I didn’t deserve to be helped,” she testified.
The officers’ attorneys cast Fontaine as a liar and an opportunist who gave conflicting statements under oath over the years.
In her ruling, Stephenson clearly sided with the defense’s portrayal of Fontaine. The judge noted Fontaine gave statements about the events to the FBI, city inspector general and grand jury that appeared to conflict with her trial testimony — particularly whether McDonald appeared to be threatening police with the knife before he was shot.
“Fontaine tried to minimize what she saw McDonald doing with the knife in her testimony at trial,” Stephenson said. “Her trial testimony was not credible.”
The judge also derided the testimony of Jose Torres, who was driving his son to the hospital when he witnessed the shooting from a few car-lengths away on Pulaski Road. Torres testified in November that he never saw McDonald make an aggressive move toward the police and was so shocked at the amount of shots he yelled out from his car.
“I was upset, and I said why the f— are they still shooting?” Torres said. Minutes later, a police officer directing traffic ordered him to leave the scene. It wasn’t until days later, after seeing a police union spokesman characterize the shooting as justified in a news report, that Torres reached out to the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigated police shootings at the time, to report what he saw. He later spoke to FBI as well.
Stephenson questioned the validity of Torres’ account, even concluding in her ruling he was farther away from the shooting than he’d indicated.
What a surprise, a corrupt Cook county Judge ruling in favor of murderous, corrupt Chicago police officers! Nothing to see here, move along or be prosecuted.