Judge: City Attorney Concealed Evidence Of Police Shooting
By Kate Shepherd in News on Jan 5, 2016 10:36PM
A top attorney for the City of Chicago has resigned after a federal judge said he hid evidence in a deadly police shooting case.
A jury ruled in March 2015 that the 2011 shooting death of Darius Pinex by Chicago police officers during a traffic stop was justified, according to the Tribune. 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. Chang overturned the verdict, imposed sanctions against the city and granted a new trial.
Marsh "intentionally withheld radio recordings from the night of the shooting leading up to the trial", according to the Wall Street Journal. Marsh resigned on Monday.
"After hiding the information, despite there being numerous times when the circumstances dictated he say something about it, Marsh said nothing, and even made misleading statements to the court when the issue arose," Chang wrote in his ruling.
Corporation Counsel Steve Patton, who oversees the city's Law Department, told ABC7 that he's going to make sure it never happens again by reviewing the department's training and evidence gathering procedures.
"The attention, the focus, the fact that the federal government is coming in to investigate the city and the police department," he told ABC7. "All of this creates a critical mass where I think there's an opportunity to take steps that for whatever reason have not been taken before."
Patton has the support and confidence of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who does not believe federal investigators need to probe the Law Department in addition to their ongoing investigation of the Chicago Police Department, he said at a press conference.
"No. I think that [federal investigators] are working where they are," Emanuel told reporters. "Steve [Patton] has my support to make sure that this doesn't happen again."