Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project—Significant Achievements for 2013-14
• The Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic won a landmark decision in the Illinois Appellate Court that established that records related to police misconduct belong to the public. This historic decision under the Freedom of Information Act will dramatically improve transparency and police accountability throughout Illinois and serve as a model for other states around the nation.
Graduating students Italia Patti and Saul Cohen argued the case in the Court of Appeals. Experienced appellate counsel observed that their arguments and knowledge of the law exceeded those of top-flight appellate litigators.
This case, brought on behalf of journalist Jamie Kalven in late 2009, evolved from the Clinic’s work uncovering a pattern of police abuse in Chicago public housing. After years of documenting a pattern of police abuse in Chicago public housing, the Clinic obtained and analyzed the Police Department’s internal police misconduct investigations and data concerning the officers who accumulated the most abuse complaints in the City. The Clinic found that a tiny percentage of the police force was responsible for nearly half of all complaints of police abuse in the City. However, those officers had been allowed to abuse some of the most vulnerable residents in Chicago with impunity. While the Clinic was able to win access to those critical data, it was unable to share the records with the broader public.
In its March 2014 decision, the Court of Appeals recognized the public’s right to this information to enable the citizenry to fulfill its role of ensuring that law enforcement is acting in the public interest. More than 10 Clinic students contributed to this victory.
A fuller account of the Clinic’s work on this project is available at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/big-win-police-accountability.
• Based on the Clinic’s appellate victory, the Clinic won a consent decree in July 2014 that opened the Chicago Police Department to the public. Going forward, members of the public will have access to police misconduct complaints, completed investigations, and data about officers charged with repeated abuse. This information had never before been available to members of the public. The policy sea change embodied in the decree creates the context to take on issues of police misconduct that have gone unaddressed for decades, identify patterns of abuse, and build the public trust needed to make the Department more effective in fighting crime, particularly in Chicago’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The Clinic intends to develop an informational clearinghouse for researchers, lawyers, journalists, law enforcement, and members of the public to improve police accountability, service, and public safety.
• Five Clinic students, Pedro Gerson, Matt Streit, Catherine Sullivan, Joshua Burday, and Ian Todd won a nearly $2 million dollar jury verdict in federal court in Padilla v. City of Chicago, 06 C 5462. A group of five Chicago police officers from the Department’s elite Special Operations Section engaged in a years-long conspiracy to target vulnerable people for false arrest so that they could break into peoples’ homes and rob them. Pursuant to their conspiracy, they falsely arrested our client, Noel Padilla, who had just become a father for the first time. They then dragged him around the city in handcuffs over the course of the next four hours, as they invaded the homes of his family members, looking for money to steal. When they came up empty handed, they planted drugs on Mr. Padilla; they robbed him of his money that he had saved for a security deposit for an apartment for his young family; and they wrote false reports accusing him of a crime that they knew that he did not commit—a crime that could have landed him in prison for the next 40 years.
The false charges were ultimately dismissed 278 days later, when the officers’ criminal conspiracy came to light. However, Mr. Padilla endured those 278 days in the Cook County Jail, believing that he may never hold his son again.
The Clinic students proved that the five officers committed each of these terrible acts because they believed that they could do so with impunity. Students presented evidence through one of the nation’s leading mathematicians that the probability was far less than one in a thousand that the five officers or their Special Operations colleagues would face any discipline when charged with falsely arresting, illegally searching, or stealing from people. They demonstrated that the officers stole more than the freedom of our client. They also stole the honor of the thousands of good officers who serve and protect the public.
As a result of the officers’ malicious conduct, the jury awarded punitive damages to be paid directly from the officers’ pockets to punish them and deter others from engaging in similar abuse.
This case involved six years of outstanding work by more than 20 clinic students, anchored by the five mentioned above. Our clients cried tears of joy and offered their heartfelt gratitude to each and every one who fought for justice with them—even at a time when few could imagine that these officers would prey on innocent people like the Padilla family.
Each of the students and former students who contributed to this effort deserves recognition for exposing such an injustice, serving a family in real need, and becoming a part of something greater than themselves.
A fuller account of our students’ work is accessible at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/police-accountability-clinic-wins-jury-verdict-kidnapped-falsely-jailed-man.
• Finally, Clinic students Michelle Mbekeani, Mike Morrill, and Jackie Scotch-Marmo capped a successful school year with a group of high school students from Hyde Park High School by producing and showing a short documentary film on youth/police interactions from the perspectives of inner city high school students. Led by clinic alum, Chaclyn Hunt, Clinic and high school students screened the documentary and facilitated a conversation with the Illinois Racial Profiling and Data Oversight Board, which includes legislators, representatives from the Governor’s Office, the Illinois State Police, the State Attorney General, and various community groups. The conversation revolved around students’ experiences with stop and frisk practices, the lack of police accountability, and its effects on how students view the police. Members of the Board were so moved by our students’ presentation that they have proposed statewide legislation concerning data collection on stop and frisk, training for law enforcement involving the high school students and our film, and public hearings on the issues raised by the students.