When Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine on Monday defended prosecutors and blasted a Chicago Tribune series on prosecutorial misconduct as “greatly and unfairly exaggerated,” his protestations were disingenuous–and their timing was awful.
Just four days before, at a closed-door meeting, the Cook County Board approved payment of $29 million to three of the plaintiffs in the notorious Ford Heights Four case, to settle their lawsuit for misconduct against the Cook County sheriff’s office and five individual officers. The law gives prosecutors immunity from liability–but the Illinois Supreme Court overturned one Ford Heights conviction on the grounds that prosecutors had knowingly allowed a key witness to lie under oath.
Add to that a settlement already approved for the fourth plaintiff in the case, and the total bill to taxpayers for the misdeeds in the case comes to about $36 million–the largest such settlement in U.S. history.
Still, Devine attempted to shoot the messenger–the Tribune’s five-part investigative series in January–rather than talk about the egregious conduct of county law enforcement officials in the Ford Heights case and 207 other cases in Cook County during the past 20 years in which misconduct by the prosecutors resulted in new trials being granted.
Who can blame him for not wanting to talk about such a disgraceful record?
The $36 million settlement in the Ford Heights case seeks to bring the whole sordid affair to a speedy conclusion and avoid the embarrassment–and additional liability and legal expenses–of a lengthy trial showcasing other revelations of misconduct by Cook County sheriffs and prosecutors in the case. A spokesman for the sheriff’s office said last week that an internal investigation of the Ford Heights case was stalled at the urging of the state’s attorney’s office.
During his remarks Monday before a special Illinois House committee, Devine said there is a huge difference between honest errors by prosecutors and intentional misconduct. If that’s the case, we’d expect Devine to be all in favor of a criminal justice system that separated the honest and the dishonest, and appropriately punished the dishonest. Instead, as the Tribune series showed, the justice system has buried hundreds of prosecutors’ mistakes–honest or dishonest. And Dick Devine obviously wants to keep them buried.
Greatly and unfairly exaggerated charges? Try and sell that to the four men in the Ford Heights case, who spent a total of 65 years of their life in jail–two of the men on Death Row–for a crime they did not commit.
