Chicago was on edge Thursday morning as civic leaders readied for protests and police officials upped deployments in preparation for a possible not-guilty verdict in former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder trial.
Alderman Derrick Curtis went so far as to publish a flyer Wednesday night reminding residents of the 18th Ward of the looming conclusion to the trial and the corresponding increase in police presence. “In the event Officer Vandyke (sic) is acquitted I am asking all residents to join me in continuing to help me keep our neighborhood safe,” the flyer read.
Some black residents expressed gloomy feelings about the closing stage of the nearly half-decade saga, which included denials and cover-ups by both police and elected officials who fought to keep the damning video of the killing from being made public.
“I think he’s going to get off,” 57-year-old Tonzell Brumley told NBC News. “I pray he doesn’t but I feel like he will.”
“I feel Chicago is going to be in a lot of trouble if this man walks free,” 35-year-old Marcus Wallace told the station. “That video is indisputable, and if a jury doesn’t see that, lord help us.”
Father Michael Pfleger, a longtime civil rights leader famous in the city as the most prominent white face of intersectional liberation movement organizing, called on residents to go on economic strike should the jury acquit. “Don’t go to work, school or spend any money shopping,” Pfleger wrote on his social media feeds.
Other locals took a more inflammatory tack. “My personal opinion about what Chicago wants, specifically the black community? They want revenge and not justice,” Dominick Izzo, a former city cop running for Cook County Sheriff this fall, wrote on Facebook. Izzo’s note, which described McDonald’s killing as “a bad shoot” but not a criminal one, included a screenshot of a post from another person that vowed violence against police officers and people in neighborhoods where Chicago police live should Van Dyke be acquitted. The sheriff’s candidate also leapt from the killing of a black resident by a sworn public servant to the city’s broader gunfire problem, seemingly believing that people must choose between caring about civilian crime and investing in accountability for “bad shoots” by the people entrusted to use lethal force in their names.
Chicagoans have good reason to fear an acquittal given how things have played out in court over the past month. Special Prosecutor Joe McMahon’s team have at times gotten bogged down in details far afield from the core question of whether Van Dyke’s six-second decision to shoot was justified. In an hour-long closing argument Thursday morning, lead defense attorney Dan Herbert laid out numerous places he believes he’s poked holes in the state’s case.
Multiple officers called to the stand by the prosecution to testify that they had not fired on McDonald, and in one case had trailed him for roughly 10 minutes while calling for backup to come with a taser, also insisted on cross-examination by Herbert that Van Dyke’s different decision was understandable, justified, and correct. In closing, Herbert asserted that the jury could stop right there: If Van Dyke’s colleagues on the scene say it was clean, then that should be all the jury needs to acquit.
That isn’t true, of course, legally speaking. The prosecution’s core case hinges on the police dashboard camera tape that shows McDonald walking near but not toward Van Dyke’s squad car.
The defense presented a lengthy animated recreation of the events, repeatedly brought up the faulty “21-foot rule” that teaches officers to unholster and level their weapons if someone with a knife gets inside that distance to them (but does not treat the distance as a must-shoot killzone), and encouraged jurors to think McDonald had to be put down because he’d punctured the tire of a police car and swung his knife once at the truck driver who first called 911 that night. Prosecutors, in exchange, reminded jurors that McDonald had repeatedly moved to avoid and elude — rather than confront or attack — almost a dozen different cops during the moments leading up to Van Dyke’s decision to come out shooting.
Van Dyke and multiple other police witnesses insisted on the stand that things happened differently from what the video shows — that McDonald was moving toward him not away from him, and that he raised the knife menacingly. It’s a classic “who do you believe, me or your lyin’ eyes” sort of gambit from Herbert’s team — and there’s plenty of reason to think it might work.
Jeronimo Yanez was judged not guilty of murdering Philando Castile despite mountains of evidence to suggest his panicked trigger-pulling during a traffic stop was not justified. Betty Jo Shelby was acquitted of similar charges by jurors who later wrote that they didn’t think she’d made the right decision but believed the rules of court explained to them forced them to find her not guilty. Even in the most egregious cases, like Ray Tensing’s killing of Sam Dubose in Cincinnati and Michael Slager’s murder of Walter Scott in South Carolina, juries hung and exasperated judges declared mistrials. It’s exceedingly rare for an officer to be charged at all in such cases, and police have avoided convictions almost twice as often as they’ve been sent to prison for on-duty killings over the past dozen years. If Van Dyke’s case breaks the other direction, he will be just the 34th police officer convicted of an on-duty homicide since 2005.
Jurors have heard testimony to suggest that McDonald was high on PCP at the time, and that he had previously been in altercations with juvenile detention center staff. Van Dyke wouldn’t have had any of that information on the night in question four years ago, but state law allows defendants to inject evidence of a violent or disturbed history into murder trials.
The jury has also been subjected to lengthy ticky-tack sparring sessions between several different policing and medical experts from either side, with both prosecution and defense opting to war over the finest-grain details of which shots were lethal, which ones were necessary, and other subsidiary questions related to the 16 separate aggravated battery charges the state brought in addition to the overarching murder charge.
By the end, the state opted to remind jurors they are permitted to find Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder even if they don’t believe him guilty of first-degree murder — a move local court reporters had previously described as indicative of dropping confidence in their own work.
“An officer knows that when he abuses his authority and uses deadly force when it’s not reasonable and necessary, he has to be held accountable. This is not the wild west out here,” assistant prosecutor Jody Gleason said Thursday. “We know the defendant contemplated the decision to shoot Laquan before he even got out of his vehicle, before he even laid eyes on the scene, when he was a block and a half away, and he never adjusted that mindset.”
At half past twelve, Judge Vincent Gaughan — who much earlier in life walked away unharmed and without charge from a standoff with police where he’d fired a rifle inside his apartment multiple times — formally sent jurors out to deliberate. Should they convict Van Dyke on all counts, he could easily spend the rest of his life in prison. But if they only find him guilty of second-degree murder and reject the separate counts of battery and official misconduct, Van Dyke could be free on probation in just a few years.