A day after a judge acquitted five Cook County sheriff’s officers on charges they chased and fired shots at another vehicle, Rev. Jesse Jackson called the verdict “inconceivable” and likened it to the beating of Rodney King by four Los Angeles police officers.
“Men sworn to uphold and protect the law, and the people under the law, used their powers to jeopardize the lives [of the couple],” Jackson said during a news conference Friday. “It’s inconceivable they walked away free.”
In rendering his verdict in the bench trial, Judge Clayton Crane said the officers might be guilty of bad judgement, and could be found civilly liable, but couldn’t be convicted of criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt based on the evidence.
Jackson said that much like the 1992 King case, in which jurors watched a videotape of police beating the black motorist but acquitted four officers charged with assault, the judge listened to a 911 tape in which one of the officers is overheard yelling “Kill `em, kill `em” but found them not guilty.
“It discredits and defames the moral authority of our democracy for such open ugliness and bitterness to be allowed to take place,” Jackson said, referring to the officers’ actions. “The 911 tape is what should have condemned them.”
But defense lawyers said the tape showed they were doing their job, noting that one of the officers also yelled “shots fired, shots fired,” an indication that they were fired upon first and were protecting themselves.
The judge found the defense’s argument plausible in acquitting the five–Sgt. Thomas Lanigan and officers Anthony Bohling, Andrew Remus, Daniel Troike, and former officer Robert Jones, all of whom are white–of the charges arising from the chase on June 2, 1999.
The five still face a civil suit filed by the couple, Cory Simmons and his girlfriend, Dominique Mapp, who are black.
