Injustice Watch (https://www.injusticewatch.org/commentary/page/3/)
Two years after the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder case highlights the rigidity of Illinois’s firearms enhancements and truth-in-sentencing laws.
Without money bail, how do we decide who stays in or out of jail before trial? A pretrial justice expert weighs in.
We’re left with two questions in the Laquan McDonald case: Why would the process take so long, as officials have had the video since long before its public release? And will the statements of officers in other incidents also be up for review?
By gagging lawyers in the case against the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald, Judge Vincent M. Gaughan has done a disservice to the people of Chicago, their police department, the city administration, and the Cook County judiciary.
Editors Note: Today marks our first commentary from contributing editor Stephen Henderson, the Pulitzer-prize winning editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column also appears.
When they buried Emmett Till in 1955, his mother, Mamie, wanted to be sure America could see her son’s battered face and head, the crushed bone and deep bruises inflicted by two Mississippi men who ravaged the life out of him. So she chose a casket with a glass top. If you could bring yourself to look inside, you couldn’t look away. And you couldn’t look past what the image said about the nation in which Till lived, where black men and boys could quickly be hung from trees or beaten to death for the slightest indiscretion, or for no reason at all. Mamie Till knew the image of her son in that casket, published in newspapers and magazines across the country, would be a call to an American reckoning, and to action.
Eighty-five years ago last week, the Illinois Supreme Court branded witness recantations categorically unreliable — a generalization that, albeit untrue, haunts the Illinois criminal justice system to this day, denying or delaying exonerations of innocent prisoners whose convictions rest on perjured testimony.
Mr. Superintendent, while you are reviewing old cases of alleged police misconduct…..what about taking a look at the cases from Gresham back in the days when you were commander?
Chicago police accountability task force makes many significant findings about racism and its pernicious impact of criminal justice. But the pattern of crises leading to reports that end covered in dust seems never ending.
Eddie Johnson may be well qualified to be Chicago police superintendent. Then again, maybe he’s not. We don’t know. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel rammed Johnson’s appointment through the City Council Wednesday, the byword was due diligence be damned. Neither the mayor nor any alderperson bothered to inquire about alleged police brutality that occurred under Johnson when he was commander of the South Side Gresham district between 2008 and 2012.
News of Chicago cops’ surveillance on political groups is nothing new. Back when Richard J. Daley was mayor, the Red Squad got diverted from suspected subversives to political opponents.