Page 10 - SEPTEMBE 2018 Newsletter

City strategy sells out officers, generates new revenue for attorneys
Corporation Counsel Attorney Jennifer Notz marched into a meeting of several aldermen in 2017, telling them that the City should settle a $31 million lawsuit brought by four men who claimed they had been wrongfully convicted of gang raping and murdering a prostitute in 1994.
The men, known as the Englewood Four, claimed they were coerced into confessing to the crime. The FOP strongly rejected the settlement, as did the detectives who worked the case. They re-
main convinced that the four men were involved in the crime, despite the fact that a DNA sample taken from the victim came back matching another man.
Here’s how solid the case was: One of the four men told the detectives they dumped a shovel and mop handle in a nearby city lagoon. Investigators relocated there with the marine unit and found a mop handle and shovel.
Nevertheless, Notz warned that if the City didn’t settle, it could face an even bigger settlement if the case went to trial. Without much discussion, and without any serious inquiry into the facts of the case, the City Council approved the $31 million settlement. Only aldermen Nicholas Sposato of the 38th Ward and Anthony Napolitano of the 41st Ward opposed it.
Notz again came before the same collection of aldermen on the financial committee in June, telling them that the City should settle another case, this one for $2.5 million. In it, offi- cers from the Area Central Gun Team executed a search warrant on the residence of a woman, Aretha Simmons, after officers learned that her boyfriend was dealing dope. In the home, they found some dope, drug paraphernalia and a loaded gun in a purse owned by Simmons.
Al Hofeld Jr., an attorney for Simmons, filed what originally looked like a bizarre, doomed lawsuit claiming that the officers pointed a gun at the woman’s child, thereby terrifying the child and causing the child lasting psychological damage. This psy- chological damage to the child was allegedly key in the City’s decision to do a sudden about-face only days before the trial was set to start and settle with Simmons.
Notz claimed to the aldermen that a previous arrest in 2013 by two of the involved officers, John Wrigley and Jack O’Keefe, further damaged the credibility of the case. In that 2013 arrest, Notz said, the officers’ conduct and testimony were suspicious. She claimed that a video of that previous arrest contradicted the officers’ testimony.
Notz failed to mention that the FOP has filed a complaint with the Inspector General claiming that it was the conduct of IAD Sergeant Majed Assaf, who investigated the case, that was suspicious, rather than that of the officers.
The FOP pored over the two officers’ testimony and reports of that 2013 arrest and compared them with Assaf’s ruling. Here is what the FOP stated in their complaint:
“In conclusion, the FOP believes that Sgt. Assaf ’s investigation and report of this case is rife with fraudulent statements and
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omissions of key evidence and testimony. It is therefore a vio- lation of Rule 14. In recommending the termination of Officers Wrigley and O’Keefe, Sgt. Assaf has violated their due process. A circumspect investigation of this case would, in our minds, in- clude establishing whether there is a pattern of such misconduct on the part of Sgt. Assaf in other investigations.”
Notz’s claims about settling the Simmons case are equally suspicious.
Really? Lasting psychological damage to a child by the police in a household apparently committed to criminal activity, with gang members and guns inside? Will every warrant now be mea- sured based upon some alleged psychological harm to a child?
Why is there no discussion about the lasting psychological ef- fects of growing up in a house used by a drug dealer who is also a gang member with a long rap sheet?
Let’s take a close look at what is really going on.
In the Simmons case, her attorney was heading into the fed- eral trial with what looked like a very difficult case to win. The warrant, after all, was successful. Simmons’ boyfriend was sen- tenced to 17 years as a result of the evidence obtained from it. That in and of itself revealed what great police work the offi- cers were doing. But then Hofeld tapped into a strategy that had worked in winning other similar lawsuits against the City. His legal team, which eventually included the powerhouse law firm Loevy & Loevy, claimed that the City had withheld documents from discovery in the case. It wasn’t the first time that the City had been accused of doing so. The judge in the Simmons law- suit seemed fed up.
So, what was the City’s real motive to settle the case? Was it the accusations that City attorneys were accused of withholding documents? Were the allegations that a child suffered psycho- logical harm by officers pointing their guns at her just an excuse for the City to get out of the case?
Remember, the City was just days away from trial when it settled. Why didn’t the City attorneys see the supposed trauma against the child earlier on?
Hofeld must have thought that he had hit the legal lottery. His case went from extremely difficult to a multimillion-dollar set- tlement over lost documents and a bizarre claim of child trau- ma.
The taxpayers were out another $2.5 million, added to the $31 million from the Englewood Four case.
And the police? Well, they were cast into a world of ignominy for the rest of their careers, for such a settlement will haunt ev- ery case they ever work.
The decision to settle this case was a great betrayal of the of- ficers and will have a devastating impact throughout the City.
This is already becoming clear, and here is why: Remember Notz’s claims in front of the aldermen in the financial commit- tee that it was better to settle the Englewood Four and Simmons cases than go to trial and lose?
Well, it’s painfully clear that those claims were pure nonsense. The same attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Simmons,
MARTIN PREIB
SecondVice President’s Report