Gov. Bruce Rauner said he would sign legislation allowing voters to recall the mayor of Chicago, but he says the law wouldn’t apply to Rahm Emanuel.
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Victims said the torture was overseen by Jon Burge, a former military police investigator who served in Vietnam before joining the Chicago Police Department as a detective in 1972.
The narrative of events told by Mosqueda and his partner, Officer Gildardo Sierra, held that their dispatcher had described an Oldsmobile sedan with a and armed occupants inside – evidence given as the reason the officers pulled Pinex over in the first place, and why they approached his auto with their guns drawn. But U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang ruled on Monday that the trial was “unfair” because attorney Jordan Marsh covered up evidence that contradicted the cops’ accounts of the shooting.
Marsh resigned from his post on Monday, Aumann left his job with the city in August.
Since November, Chicago has been dealing with fallout from the release of a video showing a white officer fatally shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald. Police has called the shooting of Jones an accident and claim LeGrier was being combative toward officers before he was shot.
The head of the Independent Police Review Authority – which is responsible for investigating complaints of excessive force by officers – told reporters Monday that greater openness about ongoing investigations would be a point of emphasis as she tries to win the lost confidence of Chicagoans, many of whom believe the agency has operated for years to bury police wrongdoing.
But Chang also had criticism for the department as a whole in his ruling, including about its record keeping.
In October, the Guardian launched a lawsuit against the City of Chicago that exposed a Chicago police station essentially serving as a secret “interrogation warehouse” where police routinely denied legal representation to the mostly African American detainees.
Torreya L. Hamilton, a private lawyer, said Chang also sanctioned the city’s law department for not being forthcoming with evidence in a case in which she was helping represent a man who accused police of false arrest and an illegal search.
Wilson was retried and reconvicted of the murders five years later, but filed a civil lawsuit against Burge for torture.
The ruling tosses a April jury decision that found two officers were justified in killing Darius Pinex during a 2011 traffic stop. A spokesman for Chicago’s Law Department could not be reached for comment.
The plaintiffs asked for a recording of what the officers claimed to have heard over the radio – and while a recording and related documents were available, they were not shared with the plaintiffs, according to the judge.
LeGrier also was shot and killed, and his body fell on top of Jones’, the lawsuit said.
Lynch said that the investigation into the department’s “patterns and practices” would focus on the use of excessive and deadly force, racial bias, and systems of accountability to determine whether its officers systematically violate constitutional rights.
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“To say this is a practice, a systemic abuse or part of a coverup, there’s just no evidence of that”, Patton said.
