Unsealed document describes cozy relationship between Chicago cops and prosecutors
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In a document unsealed on Wednesday, a former Cook County, Illinois, prosecutor described how Chicago police played suspects against each other in a 1994 case and pressured prosecutors to move cases along.
Former assistant State’s Attorney Terence Johnson, who worked in the felony review unit, told the FBI in a March 2012 interview that police would complain to supervisors when prosecutors in the unit were slow to approve charges or were asking for additional evidence, the Chicago Tribune reports. The Chicago Sun-Times also has a story.
A complaint by police could harm a prosecutor’s career, especially in well-publicized cases, Johnson said.
U.S. District Judge Robert Dow Jr. ordered release of the report in one of the lawsuits filed by four men who spent more than 15 years in prison for the rape and murder of a 30-year-old woman. The men were released after DNA pointed to another suspect. Johnson had approved charges against the men, known as the “Englewood Four.”
Johnson said police had played the suspects against each other by saying the first one to talk would become a witness, and witnesses can go home. Before statements were taken, detectives rehearsed with witnesses what they wanted them to say, according to the FBI report.
When the defendants later challenged their confession, a detective passed around a document in advance of the court hearing specifying how detectives and prosecutors should testify, Johnson told the FBI.
After release of the document, the Cook County Board approved a $5.6 million settlement with one of the Englewood Four defendants. He has also reached a tentative settlement with the city.
Johnson was fired from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office in 2000, before his guilty plea to aggravated criminal sexual abuse for sexual contact with a teenager and a girl younger than 13, according to this Chicago Tribune story.
