The judge, who didn’t appear to cite one positive aspect to the prosecution case in her ruling, acquitted Evans, 53, on all charges: two counts of aggravated battery and seven counts of official misconduct. Glenn Evans not guilty of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and official misconduct stemming from the 2013 incident involving Rickey Williams, whom Evans believed he had seen holding a gun. But his attorneys said Evans confronted Williams in the January 2013 incident after he saw Williams holding a blue steel handgun as he stood near a bus stop on the city’s South Side.
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“This was not a case of police brutality”, Evans’ defense attorney Laura Morask told reporters after the verdict, reports DNAinfo Chicago.
Judge Diane Cannon said there were too many inconsistencies in the testimony of Rickey Williams whom prosecutors said had a gun shoved down his throat by Commander Glenn Evans. He says Evans must have mistaken a cellphone he had been holding for a weapon.
Ando acknowledged he asked an investigator and two supervisors early on to find out if Evans was left-handed after Williams said the police commander held a gun in his left hand and a Taser in his right. He said he never thought it was necessary to gather a DNA sample from Evans, as was requested by state police biologist Jennifer Patterson.
A civil lawsuit by Williams against the city is proceeding, said his attorney, Stephan Blandin.
According to the judge, William’s testimony was not acceptable because the suspect could not pick Evans out in a lineup.
The city’s main police oversight agency, the Independent Police Review Authority, also came under fire during the trial.
But Cannon said that the DNA evidence only established that Evans had contact with Williams, something that was not in dispute.
The judge also pointed to varying accounts of descriptions of the police officer’s appearance. In the McDonald case, her critics note it to took Alvarez 13 months to charge Van Dyke, and that charge was only announced after a judge forced the Emanuel administration to make public the dashcam video of the incident. In her closing argument, Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Luaren Freeman called the evidence “a smoking freaking cannon”.
“It can not be ignored that IPRA was the sole investigating agency”, Morask said, dubbing the agency “inept, corrupt and comically laughable”.
Evans, who is one of the highest ranking members of the department to ever face criminal charges, was a polarizing figure in the community. “In what world is putting a gun barrel down someone’s throat doing police (work)?”
Recently fired Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy called Evans “his best guy”, according to a WBEZ report previous year preceding the trial, which also noted that the feeling among officers toward Evans wasn’t universal. Dante Servin was charged with involuntary manslaughter and other charges in the shooting death of an unarmed black woman in 2012, but in April a judge suggested that prosecutors filed the wrong charges against the officer and acquitted him.
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