Page 10 - December 2017

SecondVice President’s Report
Bombshell verdict shows why police take the Fifth
It’s a bombshell.
From the Chicago Tribune:
A federal jury sided with Chicago Police Friday
and awarded no damages to a woman who alleged that detectives coerced her into confessing to the killing of her 4-year-old son more than a decade ago...
After hearing three weeks of evidence, the jury deliberated for about seven hours before finding in favor of the officers on all seven counts, including
conspiracy, fabrication of evidence, malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
What makes this verdict particularly chilling is the fact that attorneys for the detectives argued in the trial that Nicole Harris was guilty of the murder.
So who would believe for an instant that a collection of Chi- cago detectives would suddenly and arbitrarily decide to trans- form the seemingly accidental death of a child into a murder case, fingering the mother who had just lost that child as the killer? To believe this story, one has to imagine that detectives are so corrupt in Chicago that they come to work and throw murder cases on people, even a woman still grieving the loss of her child.
But that’s exactly the bill of goods sold in the Nicole Harris case, transforming Harris from child killer into victim.
On Nov. 17, that narrative finally suffered a mortal blow in the federal courts — not the Chicago courts — as a jury weighed the evidence and rejected every claim against the detectives made by Harris’s high-powered legal team, including Joey Mogul, top attorney at the People’s Law Office. After 13 years of fighting the case, the detectives are finally vindicated.
To repeat: The attorneys for the detectives argued that Harris was guilty of the murder.
The timing of the verdict is also compelling.
Earlier in the week, detectives refused to testify in the wrong- ful conviction bid of another killer, Jose Maysonet. Their deci- sion not to testify, on the advice of their attorneys, compelled Cook County State’s Attorney Eric Sussman not to retry the case.
A media storm blew up in the City, one media outlet after an- other attacking the decision by the detectives not to testify.
“An accused killer is walking free because five former cops — who were paid to investigate and testify — won’t talk in court,” the Sun-Times published in an editorial.
But the Harris case illuminates clearly why attorneys for de- tectives advise their clients not to testify in wrongful conviction cases.
Police responded to a call of a dead child at Resurrection Hospital in May 2005. There they discovered 4-year-old Jaquari Dancy, who had apparently died of strangulation from a cord around his neck. At first, detectives did not suspect any foul play. The death appeared accidental. Jaquari’s mother, Nicole Harris, made no statements that aroused their suspicion.
However, when detectives returned to the crime scene and conducted a canvass, interviewing neighbors, they obtained statements from the neighbors that contradicted Harris’s nar- rative.
10 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ DECEMBER 2017
When the detectives confronted her, Harris spontaneously admitted that she had strangled Jaquari because she was up- set that he had left the house when she had gone to the laun- dromat. Harris also gave a videotaped confession in front of a prosecutor.
At trial, however, Harris changed her story. She claimed that the detectives pushed her and threatened her, forcing her to confess. She claimed that she told prosecutors about this coer- cion, but they ignored her.
The jury didn’t believe the coercion story. They were out in just two hours. They convicted Harris, and she was sentenced to 30 years.
The federal appeals court reversed the conviction, not based on police misconduct but because of the conduct of Harris’s tri- al and decisions by the judge regarding the testimony of Harris about her child. The court left it up to prosecutors to retry Har- ris.
Cook County Prosecutor Anita Alvarez declined to retry the case, a decision that infuriates the detectives who worked the case to this day.
“The blood of Jaquari Dancy is on the Cook County State’s Attorney for not retrying this case,” said former detective Mike Landando, one of the defendants in the case.
After Harris was freed, her lawyers faced a crucial hurdle: the Certificate of Innocence. Whenever an offender is exonerated, their attorneys file a petition asking the court to declare their client’s innocence.
Obtaining the certificate lays the groundwork for a civil law- suit and intimidates City attorneys representing the detectives from going to civil trial. If a judge grants a Certificate of Inno- cence, it’s that much harder for City attorneys to maintain that the detectives did nothing wrong.
True to form for a Cook County prosecutor, Alvarez declined to contest the innocence petition, selling out the detectives and her own prosecutors once again.
The Harris case was a relatively routine murder investiga- tion, with the offender spontaneously confessing. Neverthe- less, the entire criminal justice system turned on the detectives and threw them under the bus. The prosecutor betrayed them twice, the judge who issued the Certificate of Innocence be- trayed them, and, of course, the media, who reflexively echoed the claims of Harris’s wrongful conviction attorneys, betrayed the detectives. Clearly, the jury in the trial saw things the media never did.
The detectives in this case heroically fought for 13 years to maintain the integrity of their investigation. It was their dog- gedness — along with the rare decision by the City not to settle and let the case go to trial — that made this case an exception. Imagine if the City had settled, as it normally does. How many other offenders convicted by these detectives would have come forward and made similar allegations, hoping to cash in as well? And then how long before the state’s attorney would turn on the detectives?
Doesn’t the appalling breakdown of the criminal justice sys- tem in the Harris case illuminate why detectives’ attorneys ad- vise their clients to invoke the Fifth Amendment? d
MARTIN PREIB