theworldismine13
God Emperor of SOHH
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/24/1453982/-The-horrifying-behavior-of-Anita-Alvarez-Chicago-s-head-prosecutor
Over the next year I'll be writing about the prosecutors up for election in 2016. Some of them have been tyrants in office—breaking laws, over prosecuting, and doing whatever they can to secure a conviction. I'm starting with one of the very worst ones: Anita Alvarez. And because she's been so terrible, I'm going to split her story into two posts. There are just that many examples of misconduct coming out of Alvarez's office.
Alvarez is the Cook County state's attorney, which is just another way of saying that she's the DA of Chicago. She has been working in the state's attorney's office as a prosecutor for nearly 30 years and has been the head of the office since 2008. She's up for re-election next November, and the March primary is coming up quickly. Kim Foxx, a Chicago native and a believer in criminal justice reform, is challenging her in the primary. (There will be more on Foxx in the next post.)
Alvarez is known as one of the worst prosecutors in the country. Here are just a few of the dozens of stories of misconduct and bad behavior in Alvarez’s office.
SCOTUS says that sentencing children to life without parole is cruel and unusual punishment. Alvarez recommends it anyway.
In 1990, Adolfo Davis was convicted as an accomplice to a double murder. He was 14 years old when he was sentenced to life without parole. It was never even established that he fired the gun.
Then, in 2012, it looked like Davis might get another shot at a more reasonable sentence after SCOTUS ruled that mandatory sentencing of children to life without parole was cruel and unusual punishment. The court left it up to the state whether or not that ruling would apply to those already incarcerated, and in Illinois, dozens of prisoners were given new sentencing hearings. Davis was the first one to be re-sentenced.
During the hearing his lawyers told the court about Davis’s childhood, where he lived in a “crawl space with dirt floors” and was raised by a “loving but illiterate grandmother who struggled to meet his most basic needs like cooking or doing laundry.” The defense described a man who suffered from mental health issues that were not getting treated.
Alvarez's office made the pretty shocking argument that Davis should be re-sentenced to life in prison without parole. Remember, this guy was convicted of being an accomplice at age 14. Unfortunately, prosecutors were successful. Earlier this year a judge ruled for the state, stating, "[his] commendable acts towards self-improvement, and the support he has received from well-meaning but uninformed persons, are not sufficient for this court to alter his sentence."
Davis will be in jail for the rest of his life.
A witness recants his testimony in a murder trial and gets charged with perjury.
In 1994, Willie Johnson testified against two men that he said had committed a double homicide. Seventeen years later Johnson recanted his testimony in a post-conviction hearing for the two defendants. He said that he had been afraid to tell the truth at the original trial because he and his family had been threatened. He stated that he was sure that the two men who had gone to prison for murder were not the actual killers.
This goes without saying, but prosecutors should want a system where people can tell the truth, even if they fail to do it when they should. They should want to encourage witnesses to come forward.
But Alvarez's office wasn't having it. They believed Johnson's recantation was a lie and decided to charge him with perjury. The vindictive and overzealous charge was a message to all potential witnesses to not come forward with recanted testimony. Journalist Rob Warden called it “one of the more outrageous prosecutions” he has seen.
A number of high profile lawyers and elected officials, including former Governor Thompson and a retired appeals court judge, found the perjury charge disturbing. They sent Alvarez a letter stating that prosecuting Johnson would “would not only deter false recantations, but also truthful ones,” and asking her to drop the charge. Alvarez refused and Johnson was convicted.
Earlier this year Johnson was pardoned by former Governor Pat Quinn, another indication that many elected officials think Alvarez’s decision was egregious. Meanwhile, the convicted murderers are still in jail.
Alvarez punishes woman for standing up to law enforcement
Here's another mind-blowing example of Alvarez's terrible use of discretion. In 2010, Tiawanda Moore filed a complaint with the Chicago Police Department, claiming that she had been sexually harassed by law enforcement. She said that a Chicago police officer had come to her house because of a domestic complaint, asked to speak to her in the bedroom, and then touched and grabbed her breast.
After she filed a complaint, she was threatened by two internal affairs investigators who tried to convince her not to pursue the issue. Sensing something shady was going on, Moore recorded her conversation with the investigators on her cell phone. But when she approached authorities with the recording, it wasn’t the officer and investigators that were charged. Instead Alvarez's office charged Moore with violating the state's (now non-existent) wiretapping law. The charge could have landed her in prison for up to 15 years. Luckily, in a great example of jury nullification, she wasn’t convicted. Said one juror, "Everybody thought it was just a waste of time and that (Moore) never should have been charged."
Cop murders Laquan McDonald. Alvarez takes a year to charge him.
In 2014, Jason Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald 16 times as he was walking away. There was no threat, no danger, and absolutely no reason for the murder. The video footage—which was released this past Tuesday—shows him shooting McDonald in the back and continuing to shoot while he's laying dead on the ground. Van Dyke only stops shooting to reload his gun, at which point another officer tells him to quit firing.
The cops’ original report stated that McDonald had been killed by one bullet to the chest.
Prosecutors knew about this shooting a year ago and had access to the footage. According to the Chicago Tribune, "Alvarez said she has never seen anything like the video in her three decades in law enforcement. She called the video 'graphic,' 'violent' and 'chilling' and said that it 'no doubt will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans.'"
But she didn't charge Van Dyke last October. In fact, she didn't charge him for thirteen months. She only charged him with murder after a judge ruled that the dashboard camera footage would be publicly released.
Alvarez claims she was waiting for state and federal investigations to finish before charging Van Dyke, but many believe she was trying to protect the cop. “There are an average of 50 police shootings of civilians every year in Chicago, and no one is ever charged,” said Craig Futterman, one of the attorneys that investigated the story, to the Chicago Reporter. “Without the video, this would have been just one more of 50 such incidents, where the police blotter defines the narrative and nothing changes.”
The chairman of the City Council's Black Caucus, Alderman Roderick Sawyer expressed his unhappiness to the Sun Times:
“It’s politically motivated that you decide to do it at this time when you have generously had 10 months — I won’t even go back to the full 13 months — to make a determination to file charges and didn’t. Oftentimes, it takes days to make these types of determinations[.]”
Alvarez undercharged the cop that murdered Rekia Boyd and then purposefully tanked the case—all because she wanted to continue getting campaign donations from police unions.
In March of 2012, Rekia Boyd was shot and killed by Chicago police officer Dante Servin. Servin shot five bullets indiscriminately into a crowd of people, firing over his shoulder from his car. Boyd was hit in the back of the head and killed. Servin was charged with involuntary manslaughter, and a judge acquitted him on all charges—but not for the reasons you may think. The judge believed that it wasn't involuntary manslaughter he was guilty of—it was first degree murder.
"It is easy to say, 'Of course [Servin] was reckless. He intentionally shot in the direction of a group of people on the sidewalk. That is really dangerous. ... Case closed,'" said the judge. "It is easy to think that way, but it is wrong. It ignores the law on this subject." DNAinfo reported that the judge "pointed to a history of Illinois court rulings that say: When someone intends to fire a gun, points toward his victim and shoots—much like Servin […]— that behavior is not reckless." It is intentional. Alvarez’s office knew exactly what the law was and yet they charged him with a charge they could not prove.
The ruling meant that Servin walked free, and many believe that Alvarez deliberately lost the case. Chicago attorney Sam Adam, Jr. stated:
“To charge that as reckless conduct and not first-degree murder — either you’re doing it because you want to curry favor with the police department or you’re completely inept,” Adam said. “I think there’s no question it was deliberate. She wants to curry favor with the FOP. It took a $4.5 million settlement to get charges in this case. She was stuck in a hard place. If you charge first-degree murder, the FOP is mad at her. If you don’t charge anything, the community is upset. So you play the odds. That says you’re thinking about your job, not about what’s right.”
For those doubting that Alvarez tanked the case intentionally, wait until you hear about Miguel Adorno. My former colleague Shaun King wrote about him in April:
On January 23rd, 2010 Miguel Adorno fired his gun under his arm, much like Dante Servin claimed to, at a party in Chicago. A bullet hit Shannon Fanning in the arm. Nobody died, but Miguel Adorno was charged and convicted with attempted murder and given a mandatory 15-year prison sentence. On June 14th, 2013, Miguel Adorno appealed this decision, stating that he was overcharged and over-sentenced for something was purely reckless.
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