Just what constitutes Justice?

VAN DYKE: What will be left of life?

I can already hear the rants from people who fear that justice (or is that Justice! with a capital “J”) won’t be served in coming weeks.

The would-be defendants whom some are eager to see prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law (if not beyond the extend, with the mythical “book” being thrown at them) are none other than Alderman Edward M. Burke and former police officer Jason Van Dyke.

BURKE: Does he still have a political life?

VAN DYKE, OF course, is the white police officer who was found guilty last year of criminal offenses in the 2014 shooting death of a teenager who happens to be black.

While Burke is the long-time alderman named in a criminal complaint suggesting that he went too far in terms of shaking down a business that wants to remodel a Gage Park neighborhood Burger King franchise.

The very franchise, in fact, where Laquan McDonald, the black teenager, was shot nearby on that night in ’14 when he didn’t stop fast enough to satisfy Van Dyke’s concerns.

It seems that federal prosecutors would like to strengthen their criminal case against Burke by getting a grand jury to indict him on some sort of charge – perhaps something far more significant than he currently faces.

WHICH IS WHY attorneys were in court this week. In theory, prosecutors had until Friday – the next scheduled court date – before they would have to put up or shut up, so to say. Instead, an extension was granted. May 3 is now the significant date.

A fact that will anger those people so eager for a Burke criminal conviction that they dream of it being the factor that knocks him out of the running for the Feb. 26 municipal elections.

Legal notoriety? Or is all publicity good?

Even if the 14^th Ward aldermanic race stretches to an April 2 run-off (which is very likely), it means the elections will be over before we know exactly what will become of Burke on the criminal justice front. He could easily wind up being re-elected before actual charges are known.

It will complicate the desires of those who just want Ed Burke out of office – and really don’t care much about the specific details. It sort of makes it easier for Burke to focus on campaigning for re-election if actual criminal charges are theoretical.

AS FOR FRIDAY in court, it now means nothing for Burke. But for those eager to see criminal justice action that day, the focus will be solely on Van Dyke.

For he’s the one found guilty of second degree murder and multiple counts of aggravated battery with a firearm. Theoretically, he could get multiple sentences for each charge that could have a minimum of 96 years in prison.

A sentence that would appease those people eager to see a cop go to prison for what they will forevermore see as a racially-motivated slaying. But prosecutors admitted this week there is a way to interpret the sentencing guidelines so that Van Dyke could theoretically get 15 years of actual prison time.

At age 40 now, he’d be 55 upon release. Which would still allow him a chance to have some life left in freedom – even though it will be his aging years, as the rest of what’s left of his youth would be spent in prison somewhere.

IT WILL BE interesting to see how Judge Vincent Gaughan interprets the law in this case. I have no doubt everybody’s going to be outraged – from those who want Van Dyke to get some form of probation up to those who want him to get a lengthy, demoralizing prison term then want him to die at the hands of his fellow inmates.

GAUGHAN: Expected to impose sentence Friday

Which is a sick attitude to have, but it is one that becomes all too common amongst the general public. The very reason why we don’t let public sentiment play too much of a role in criminal cases.

Similar to those who would like to see Ed Burke get hauled off to the pokey, so to speak, as punishment for all the ideologically-motivated acts he committed throughout his 50 years in the City Council.

Public sentiment all too often leads to rash acts that, in and of themselves, are an injustice.

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Altering evidence? Or preserving pieces of a crime scene? That is the question

A civil court jury in Cook County found it within itself to clear the county sheriff’s police of wrongdoing in the way it handled the body of a 20-year-old woman who was killed five years ago in a car crash in the forest preserves near suburban Oak Forest.


That ruling in Cook County Circuit Court came on Friday, and I’m going to have to respect the judgment because I wasn’t there during the civil trial to hear every bit of evidence for myself.

BUT I HAVE to admit that reading the reports that came from the trial make me wonder about the logic of what was repeatedly called police “protocol” to justify the way the cops handled the scene.

This particular lawsuit wound up getting coverage because the woman killed in the auto accident wound up being stripped partially naked when photographers taking pictures of the scene as possible evidence in future criminal proceedings.

The girl’s mother seems to feel her daughter was violated by such acts, particularly since the fact wound up spurring rumors that the girl was somehow naked and having sex at the time of the car crash.

As it turned out, the driver of the vehicle tried claiming the girl was straddling him at the time – claiming that was what caused him to lose control of the vehicle.

BUT INVESTIGATORS WERE able to show that it was impossible for any such act to have occurred. Meaning the driver, himself, was to blame for losing control of the vehicle. He wound up being found guilty of criminal charges and is now serving a prison sentence. The photographs that were the focus of this lawsuit were supposedly key evidence in gaining his conviction.

Sheriff’s police claimed during the trial that their investigators were merely following the standard procedure for gathering up a crime scene (which is what the accident site near 147^th Street and Oak Park Avenue had become). Since crime scenes are never pretty and often garish, it is only inevitable that the evidence would be less than proper.

I don’t doubt that those crime scene photographers wind up seeing grotesque images that would wind up bothering the sensibilities of the deceased’s relatives.

But I never did read anyone explaining just why some of the photographs of the accident scene wound up showing the girl fully-clothed, and others showed her body moved to a tarp placed on the open ground where she was then stripped partially nude.

MY GUT REACTION is to wonder why this wasn’t construed as tampering with a crime scene – somehow altering the reality of what was there. No clear explanation was ever provided that I am aware of, and now I doubt that one ever will.

Not that it seemed to bother the jury that spent a good chunk of the day on Friday resolving the testimony they heard during all of last week. They seem to want to believe the police behaved professionally. Then again, some people will always argue on behalf of the police, no matter how extreme the evidence against them seems to be.

That is the verdict reached by a jury of peers, and it is what will remain as the outcome of this case – unless someone wants to try taking this to the Illinois appeals court and can come up with a specific bit of evidence that was wrongly excluded during the lawsuit’s trial.

After all, merely not liking a jury’s verdict is insufficient reason to justify granting an appeal.

PERHAPS THE MOTHER realizes that, since I read in newspaper accounts during the weekend that she is pleased she was able to publicly say her daughter wasn’t having sex or being naked or doing anything else that might be considered sordid at the time of her death.

For her sake, I hope she is capable of getting on with her life – which for the past five years and for the remainder of it will be without her daughter.

No amount of money that she might have received from Cook County as a financial reward from her lawsuit would have brought her daughter back.

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Some people just don’t get the concept of doing things more efficiently!

We’re in a new year, and it seems that the Cook County Board has a resolution – they’re going to try to run their twice-a-month board meetings more efficiently.

At least that’s what their intent seems to be. In actuality, the board on Wednesday managed to plod its way through its public business in as inefficient a manner as possible.

FOR THE RECORD, the news reports that will come out of the Wednesday session will focus on gun control – particularly the fact that the county board approved a resolution telling the General Assembly to approve a bill now pending to restrict firearms even further.

The board also will consider a measure to make it a crime to fail to report a firearm missing. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says too many people who resell firearms to people who shouldn’t have them try claiming that “oops, I forgot” to report that weapon stolen!

But that activity managed to take up about, at most, a half-hour of a four-hour session. And it came at the very end of the session.

Anybody sitting through the county board activity on Wednesday had to endure hours of minutia – particularly a full hour on the subject of when it is appropriate to use electronic monitoring on someone rather than keeping them confined in the Cook County Jail.

THE CHANGE IN policy is that county board meetings now officially will start one hour later than they used to. While all the committee meetings that previously took place simultaneously with the board meeting will take place in the first hour that used to be the county board session.

It is good in one respect. It used to be a pain in the derriere to have to keep straight whether the board was acting as a board, a finance committee or some other entity.

But on Wednesday, it meant that the committees were done within 15 minutes. And that was delayed because the bulk of the commissioners couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.

Although they eventually straggled in and a quorum was reached, I couldn’t help but notice Commissioner John Fritchey, D-Chicago, showing up for business two minutes AFTER all the committee activity was over.

NOT THAT HE missed much! Although I think Commissioner Peter Silvestri, R-Elmwood Park, hit it right on the nose when he said, “the first time we do this new schedule, there’s no business.”

Even county board President Toni Preckwinkle was off a little bit, as she initially started the formal part of the county board meeting with an announcement that committees would now meet – only to be told by Commissioner John Daley, D-Chicago, that the committee business was already complete.’

"I’m going off the old script,” she quipped.

Actually, if there’s something that the county board could do if it were seriously interested in shortening its board meetings, it would be to do away with all those ceremonial resolutions they feel compelled to debate and discuss at will.

ON WEDNESDAY, THERE was but one (by Commissioner Jesus Garcia, D-Chicago, honoring the memory of a long-deceased doctor of Mexican ethnic heritage). But there have been times when they feel compelled to honor a half-dozen people at a time – which stretches out the pomp and fluff into hours of mind-numbing activity.

Then there are all the little tidbits of business – such as the awarding of a contract to Finer Foods of Chicago to provide all the poultry products that will be fed to inmates at the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, or the deal that says county jail inmates will now be used to clean and feed the animal population at the Animal Care Facility, 2741 S. Western Ave. The city will pay the county just over $323,000 per year for that detail.

Daley might have been right technically when he said that making the change would allow the board meeting proper to “blow right through the agenda.”

But it still is a mind-numbing place to watch politicking take place – not truly gross enough to be classified as sausage-making.

BUT STILL NOT the most refined of processes to watch.

Which is why listening to Daley in response to the county board’s invocation might have been Wednesday’s highlight.

The pastor in question who gave the prayer recently transferred from a Bridgeport-neighborhood church to one in Hyde Park.

Which Daley – the life-long Bridgeport native himself – said amounts to, “leaving a great ward to go to a good ward.”

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Do we all need courthouse crash course?

I recall a moment some two decades ago when I covered the Cook County Criminal Courts building for the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago. The “story” for the day involved a man who had raped and brutally-beaten a young woman.

It's really not that mysterious a place



He was promptly arrested, and on this particular day he was brought to 26^th and California for his first court appearance in this case.

I WAS SITTING in the courtroom so I could see just what kind of bond the judge would set in the case. As it turned out, I sat within earshot of two older women – whom it seems were related to the young woman who was the crime victim.

I had to hold back a chuckle when I overheard one of the women tell someone else, “There’s going to be a trial today.”

There were dozens of trials that took place in the Criminal Courts building that day, but not for this case. It was just a bond hearing; the first step in a legal process that may seem excruciatingly slow to some people but must be followed to the letter to ensure that our judicial system produces verdicts that can stand up to review on appeal.

In fact, if I recall, that particular case took about a year-and-a-half to get resolved. The defendant eventually pleaded guilty in exchange for a prison sentence with a few years knocked off of what it could have been.

I WONDER HOW disappointed and confused those women (whom I have never seen or heard from again in my life) were with what happened that day.

Because my guess is that it is remarkably similar to the confusion/dismay/disgust that was being expressed Tuesday morning with regards to the case of the former Penn State University assistant coach who now faces criminal charges that say he forced himself sexually on 10 young men.

SANDUSKY: Following the process

Tuesday was the day in Centre County, Penn., court that was supposed to be the preliminary hearing.  Yet what wound up happening was that Jerry Sandusky made a brief court appearance and waived his “right” to such a hearing.

So Tuesday was just a procedural point that lasted just a couple of minutes.

TO LISTEN TO the outrage that was being expressed on many of the cable television news reports I saw (many of which were broadcasting the event LIVE), there was massive disappointment.

Apparently, some people were expecting the legal equivalent of a head on a pike. Instead, they got a bit of legalese that – in the long-run – doesn’t mean much.

Perhaps it is evidence that I have hung around too many courtrooms as a reporter-type person during the past 24 years. But it always amazes me how mysterious the whole legal procedure is to people.

It’s no wonder that real criminals who come into contact with the system can better figure out their options than the so-called typical person who happens to stumble into the system.

FOR THE RECORD, the point of a “preliminary hearing” is that prosecutors are supposed to present in public the types of “evidence” they say they will have to use against the criminal defendant – should the case be allowed to proceed to trial.

In short, it is about requiring prosecutors to “put up or shut up,” so to speak, and justify why this person is suspected of a crime and why his arrest and criminal charges are warranted.

A judge, in theory, has the ability to rule that the evidence put forth is weak and that the person should never have been charged and dismiss the whole case.

But that usually doesn’t happen. Judges usually wind up ruling that the arrest and charges are justified, and that the case can proceed. In fact in Cook County, prosecutors usually announce that they superseded the need for a preliminary hearing by getting a grand jury to indict the defendant.

WHICH MEANS THAT Sandusky, with advice from his attorneys, likely decided it wasn’t really worth bringing all this up right now – particularly since the degree to which prosecutors have to prove anything (none of that “beyond a reasonable doubt” rhetoric at this point in the process) is low.

They just have to show that someone made a complaint, and that they have no reason to believe these young men are lying about what they say happened to them.

Instead, it was being billed as some sort of coverup. Sandusky and his people denied “the people” a chance to hear from the accusers. They did NOT get their chance to tell their stories.

Heck, they lost their chance to begin the process of emotional recovery from their ordeals.

NONSENSE!!!!!

That point, if it ever comes, will occur during an actual trial – which also is where we get into the details to a degree that we will truly be able to comprehend what really happened between Sandusky and these young men.

It may well turn out to be such a sordid tale that many of us won’t really want to hear it. Perhaps Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” was correct in screaming, “You can’t handle the truth!”

And the fact that we’re going to have to follow a detailed, complex process to get to those details is a good thing. It is going to be what justifies whatever verdict and/or punishment is ultimately handed down.

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