Civil Rights & Police Accountability Clinic—Significant Achievements for 2017-18
Our Clinic continues to work to make the most of this historic opportunity for meaningful change in Chicago that has resulted from years of outstanding student advocacy supporting the work of and providing legal services to individuals and families who have traditionally been denied access to justice. Last summer, our Clinic brought a system-wide civil rights pattern and practice lawsuit seeking a permanent injunction against and federal judicial oversight of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), after the United States Justice Department made findings of ongoing systemic constitutional violations but then retreated from its commitment to address those conditions in the wake of the presidential election. The Clinic represents individuals and families most impacted by Chicago police abuse, and a coalition of community-based and civil rights organizations that range from Black Lives Matter Chicago and the Chicago Urban League to a Latino neighborhood association in this community-driven fight. In the past year, we successfully advocated for the Illinois Attorney General to become the first state attorney general in the United States to bring a federal civil rights pattern and practice lawsuit against a municipal police department. The Illinois AG’s intervention in Chicago brought the City to the table to negotiate a consent decree that will govern the CPD and be overseen by a federal judge, supported by an independent monitoring team. Negotiations between the City and State are ongoing. Our Clinic students, together with our clients and attorney team, drew from our clients’ lived experience, local knowledge harvested in the Clinic, and research on national best practices to draft a model Chicago Community Consent Decree available at https://www.cpdclassaction.com/cccd/. The Community Consent Decree lays out the blueprint for a comprehensive remedy and serves as a yardstick to measure the product of the City-State negotiations. We also negotiated an historic Memorandum of Agreement with the State of Illinois and City of Chicago that gives the people most impacted by CPD violence and discrimination the power to monitor and enforce the ultimate decree throughout its entire lifespan in federal court. Our Agreement also provides for a court hearing in which we can weigh in on the fairness and adequacy of any decree proposed by the City and State. Thus, our clinic students and clients won the opportunity to play a leading role over the next decade or more in efforts to solve what may be the City’s most intractable issue that continues to cause incalculable harm to people on the ground.
We also made significant progress in developing a national model for police transparency, building upon the Citizens Police Data Project (https://data.cpdp.co/data/L7azBo/citizens-police-data-project), a public database that contains information about every available investigation of Chicago Police misconduct from 1967 through the present. We partnered with the Invisible Institute to develop this database, after Clinic students established the legal precedent in Illinois that police misconduct records belong to the public in Kalven v. City of Chicago. In the past year, the information that we made public has been used in fights to free wrongfully convicted people from prison, defend people unjustly accused of crimes, expose police abuse, prosecute civil rights cases in court, and shed light on a system that has insulated abusive officers from discipline. We are presently supporting the advocacy and work in other jurisdictions to improve police transparency around the country. Back in Illinois, our clinic students, in a team led by Jeremy Chen, filed a brief before the Illinois Appellate Court that seeks to confirm that investigations of official misconduct committed by officers when off-duty also bear on their public duties and belong to the public.
Of course we did not win every fight we took on this year. We suffered a heartbreaking loss in a federal jury trial last spring in a case in which a police officer shot Justus Howell, a 17-year-old boy, twice in the back, killing him, as he was running away from the police in Zion, Illinois. Our student team of Jeremy Chen, Erica Maricich, Isabella Nascimento, and Andrew Sowle and former students, Mica Moore and Alexander Robinson, invested hundreds of hours side-by-side with our clients in the trenches, as they learned all that it means to represent a family in need, even in defeat. Our students experienced firsthand the often insurmountable barriers faced by marginalized Black families seeking justice, even and especially those who lose a loved one to state violence—the power disparities, racism, presumed lack of credibility, and bias. Our clients have modeled an ethos of service to our students. Even after their loss in court, they continue to advocate to prevent other families from losing loved ones to police brutality and to support others’ fights against odds for justice. Our students recently attended a memorial for Justus, in which our client’s family awarded academic scholarships to other promising children in need. The connections that our students made with our clients and their family will stay with both our students and clients throughout their lives. Among the legal lessons, our students learned the importance of jury voir dire to the guarantee of a fair trial. Drawing upon social scientific research and the work of fellow Clinic students with Associate Clinical Professor Judith Miller in the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic, our students drafted a powerful motion seeking to reform jury selection procedures in federal court in Chicago and to ameliorate the unconscious racial biases of potential jurors. Our student’s work captured the attention of a local federal judge, who indicated that he intends to share our work with his colleagues in the federal judiciary, showing how even in defeat, our students’ efforts have the potential to fundamentally change federal judicial practice and improve fairness in civil and criminal trials.
Graduating clinic students, Ayla Syed and Amelia Garza-Mattia, won a criminal trial, in partnership with clinic students in the Criminal Justice Clinic, under the leadership of Clinical Professor Herschella Conyers. Two Chicago police officers falsely charged our client with aggravated assault of the officers to cover up their own brutality. An officer shot our client in his stomach with a Taser, because our client had questioned the officer’s authority. (Our client asked why the officer had ordered him to get up against the wall, when our client had not committed any crime.) As our client lay face down in the street, screaming in pain, the officer tased our client again, this time in the back. The officers wrote false police reports claiming that our client attacked them, and that the officers tased him in self defense. The officers were secure in their belief that nothing would happen to them. Our client’s word (the word of an indigent Black man) would not prevail over that of the police. Police supervisors and the City signed off on the officers’ tasing as a justified use of force. However, unbeknownst to the officers, a neighbor videotaped the incident. Our students masterfully used the video to show that the officers’ sworn statements were lies. Our client fought back tears, when the judge announced the “Not Guilty” verdict. Our client was free. He now serves as a class representative in our injunctive class action to prevent the similar abuse of others.
Other graduating clinic students, Alison Giest and Zac Henderson, investigated a case of Chicago police torture of a man who had spent nearly 30 years in prison, and they presented their findings to the Illinois Torture and Inquiry Relief Commission. The Commission adopted our students’ recommendations and draft opinion, found sufficient evidence of police torture for full judicial review, and referred the case for an evidentiary hearing in the state criminal courts. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/06/09/dozens-cl….
Finally, in a happy end to a sad case to redress the years of physical abuse of our client when he was a child, the Clinic won a significant financial settlement from the child welfare workers and agencies that placed our client in harm’s way despite their knowledge of his severe repeated abuse. Our client, now middle-aged and a father himself, has long struggled with the pain of his childhood abuse. The settlement will provide needed support and treatment for years to come.