The criminal case is over, but Williams is suing Evans in federal court.
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Judge Diane Cannon played up inconsistencies in Rickey Williams’ account of the on-duty incident, saying his testimony at the trial last week “taxes the gullibility of the credulous”. She says the case should never have been charged.
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.
IPRA investigators also waited more than a year to show Williams a lineup of pictures that included Evans and other officers involved in the alleged beating. She accused Williams of being “eager to change his testimony at anyone’s request”. She opened and closed her remarks by cautioning that the case shouldn’t be grouped with other recent cases of alleged police misconduct.
“You’re telling me there was a tremendous amount of DNA there, but it was wiped?” she said.
Evans’ lawyers called the IPRA investigation “dishonest” and “inept”, noting that one of the investigators assigned to the case had been disciplined by Evans when she worked under him as a civilian employee.
Fifty two year old, Commander Evans, is a highly-decorated Chicago police officer who has received more than 48 citizen complaints in his 28 years of service.
The trial unfolded against a backdrop of protests over the killing of a black teenager by a white police officer in October 2014 and the subsequent investigation. Evans said as he arrived at court Monday with some running back moves.
Chicago’s embattled mayor Rahm Emanuel has fired the police chief and pledged the city’s “complete co-operation” with the federal probe. Others, though, said Evans symbolized the department’s failure to control its officers. Critics pointed to that total as evidence of the department’s willingness to condone or at least ignore the brutal behavior of its officers. Additionally, Williams claims that the police officer put a Taser next to his groin and threatened to kill him. Williams testified that he hadn’t been carrying a gun and that Evans must have mistaken it for a cellphone he had been holding.
In her closing statement last week, Assistant State’s Attorney Lauren Freeman said that Evans’ DNA on the pistol was not just a smoking gun “it’s a smoking, freaking cannon”, though no testing was done on the weapon to show whether the DNA came from saliva, which would indicate the weapon had been inside Williams’ mouth. Williams was charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct, but the charges were dropped three months later. Activists say that even if Evans had been found guilty, it wouldn’t necessarily matter. At a hearing in August, the judge seemed to downplay the DNA’s significance, questioning why Evans would turn his gun over to authorities if it was damaging to him. After the verdict, though, they were most critical of the Independent Police Review Authority, the city’s main police oversight agency that investigated the incident and has been harshly criticized for not recommending that enough officers be punished.
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Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, whose resignation protesters have been clamoring for, issued a statement defending her decision to charge Evans. The U.S. Department of Justice last week launched a civil rights investigation into the city’s police department.
