Chicago Columnists Throw Tantrum After Court Delivers Rare Justice for Three Chicago Police Officers

Mary Mitchell, Eric Zorn kick and scream after judge absolves officers facing sham charges of conspiracy.

Friday January 18, 2019, was scarcely a mill day in Chicago. Ever since Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan’s December 14, 2018, decision to deny Jason Van Dyke a re-trial and set a sentencing date for January 18, Chicago’s anti-police posse simmered with excitement. Buoyed by the court’s October 5, 2018, conviction of the former Chicago police officer for the shooting death of an armed Laquan McDonald, for the city’s anti-police activists, Friday the 18th would be a day in which decades of alleged police abuse would mercifully be addressed by a court, end with a lengthy prison sentence for Van Dyke, and ignominy for an entire police department.

However, one day prior to Van Dyke’s sentencing hearing, on January 17, in a second trial, a sage judge, the Honorable Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson, poured cold water all over anti-law-and-order activists’ premature celebrations when determining the fate of three Chicago police officers, all of whom played a pivotal role in the McDonald saga. Set against the turbulent backdrop of the Van Dyke trial, in the related proceeding referred to as the “cover-up case,” the three men, Officer Thomas Gaffney, former Officer Joseph Walsh, and former Detective David March were acquitted on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct, and obstruction of justice. Groundless indictments, all three had stood accused of allegedly filing false official accounts of what occurred on the evening of and in the aftermath of Van Dyke shooting the armed teen on October 20, 2014. But not long after Judge Stephenson struck the gavel and dismissed the court, the traveling circus of anti-police agitators were in front of Chicago’s media microphones and tape recorders angrily denouncing Stephenson’s verdict as a flagrant miscarriage of justice and a ghastly disservice to the cause of social justice.

Less than 24 hours after the men were acquitted, as if on cue, two Chicago journalists singing from the same anti-police-industry songsheet, the Chicago Sun Times’ Mary Mitchell, and the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn, joined in on the gang tackle of the innocent men and revealed their predilection to publish personal statements of faith over fact and truth. In two separate columns appearing on January 17 and 18 condemning Stephenson’s verdict, both Mitchell and Zorn frantically spilled digital ink declaring the trial was a shocking injustice in which police officers engaged in grave wrongdoing got off Scot-free, claim the court neglected the significance of the police dash-cam tape capturing the 2014 shooting incident, and to advance the canard a “code of silence” pervades the ranks of the Chicago Police Department.

In a column published only hours after Stephenson’s decision, Mitchell opened her hysterical tirade by asserting the verdict was “stunning” and declared three months prior to the “cover-up” trial, a jury had convicted Mr. Van Dyke on the “strength” of the police dash-cam seizing the incident. Neither timid nor inhibited in her insistence on mass-scale police wickedness, Mitchell continued to lament over the state’s inability to produce a single witness to expose the alleged “code of silence” running through the department. Persistent in her scalp hunting, Mitchell illustrated her willingness to upbraid the court for its verdict in a passage in which she asserts blind faith in the now-notorious dash-cam tape and chastises the judge for ordaining McDonald an “armed assailant.”

Claiming darkly the court “sided” with police officers on trial, Mitchell, the self-anointed matriarch of Chicago’s pundit class, wrote with bewilderment:

“But that video failed to persuade Stephenson who saw a different side — a side more akin to the police narrative that the black teenager was an “armed assailant” who refused to drop the knife and was a threat to police officers. The tone of Stephenson’s findings, read aloud in open court, suggested she saw McDonald not as a victim of a miscarriage of justice, but as a dangerous criminal.”

While Mitchell was vomiting up her indigent commentary, the Tribune’s resident brainiac, Eric Zorn, was preoccupied with his bitter and embittering critique of the ruling, endlessly bemoaning all things legal, from police conduct to videos, all the way to the length of time it required Judge Stephenson to draw her conclusion in the case. In his overwrought conniption appearing in the Tribune the day following the court rendering its verdict, Zorn describes Stephenson’s decision as “unpersuasive” and “infuriating,” and, parroting Mitchell, obsesses over the infamous dash-cam video.

Gasping for air like a landed fish, Zorn bloviated:

“Both the dashcam video and the video re-creation made by Van Dyke’s defense team show that McDonald was clearly angling away from officers as they attempted to cut him off by edging toward the path he was walking. He was swinging a small knife at his side away from the officers and was passing them at a distance of about 12 feet when Van Dyke opened fire.”

“But in her ruling, Stephenson wrote that McDonald was “walk(ing) in the direction of uniformed police officers … swinging the knife back and forth in front of him,” and that these “fluid” actions meant he could have turned from “an active resister to an armed assailant in a split second.”

“Thanks to the credulous Judge Stephenson, the record will show that everyone else acted in good faith, that there was no subsequent cover-up, not even a tacit conspiracy in the department to excuse Van Dyke’s actions. The police stories don’t line up with what we can all see in that remarkably vivid dashcam video, sure, but memories of witnesses are not infallible. The fact that all these errant memories happened to favor Van Dyke is just one of those interesting coincidences.”

While Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Zorn offer an inventive but exceedingly insular perspective, here is the rub: The police dash-cam video capturing McDonald’s death was not the sole article in the repository of evidence in the case. Additionally, McDonald was indeed armed and refused repeated lawful commands to free himself of his weapon, behavior which fittingly designated him as a menacing, armed offender.

Legally and methodically razing the state’s case against the three accused, Judge Stephenson’s words were sober, precise and unavoidably logical when she wrote:

“This Court has previously stated the State has not met its burden in proving these statements were fabricated by (Detective) March or anyone else involved with this investigation. That being said, it is not as simple as looking at the reports in comparison to what is depicted in the video. To do so would diminish the Court’s duty to look at and consider all the evidence and testimony, and to apply the law to the facts; it would imply this Court should only consider a portion of the evidence and disregard the totality of the evidence and the circumstances or the intent of the defendants charged.”

Alternatively stated, Judge Stephenson carefully maneuvered through the thicket of falsehoods enveloping the case and forthrightly challenged the prosecution’s insistence the police dash-cam video was the single, conclusive piece of evidence in the matter before her court. While Stephenson acknowledged the impact of the video, she demonstrated justice in her court is forever a passion by carefully weighing an entire inventory of evidence and testimony from witnesses, one of whom thoroughly refined the procedures for completing the myriad of official reports required in the wake of a fatal officer-involved shooting. When addressing the completion of reports related to the incident (specifically the accuracy of the General Progress Reports (GPR), Tactical Response Reports (TRR), and Officer Battery Reports (OBR) filed by the accused) Stephenson determined no proof of a conspiracy existed whatsoever, resolved in some instances official documents registered by the three men actually corresponded with the McDonald video, and any conflict in official accounts of the episode were the consequence of differing vantage points among officers present on October 20, 2014.

Mitchell and Zorn have Van Gogh’s ear for the truth.

Mitchell’s and Zorn’s overheated response to Stephenson’s ruling demonstrates, if nothing else, very few outside law enforcement understand police policies and procedures, namely the punctilious methods applied by police investigators in the aftermath of a fatal police shooting. Moreover, Stephenson’s decision is a vivid reminder courts must balance all evidence tabled, the tissue-thin charges against the police officers were profoundly misread by media and the public, and the case revolved more around whether March, Gaffney, and Walsh fulfilled their duties when entering official record regarding the events of October 20, 2014, against what was captured on a videotape. Fortunately, Judge Stephenson, who put the both the law and justice ahead of public opinion, grasped these critical facts, refused to succumb to public pressure mounted by the anti-police movement, and was uncompromising in the delivery of justice.

However, when these absolute truths were clarified by a judge, it provoked white-hot anger with Mitchell and Zorn. With the judge’s decision available for public consumption, cursory examination of Stephenson’s ruling plainly showed no compelling or convincing case against the three accused police officers men existed. Why then did Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Zorn defy the abundance of exculpatory evidence and conclude in their columns another supposed injustice involving the Laquan McDonald story took place? The answer is fairly obvious: The two journalists are craven lackeys of the anti-police movement and both are keen to contributing to the stirring of anti-police delirium across Chicago. Veiling their revulsion for police with the guise of legitimate political commentary, Mitchell and Zorn declared Stephenson’s ruling fumbling guesswork over a reasoned inquiry of facts. By dismissing Stephenson’s decision as harsh, pitiless, or empty of legal value, both Mitchell and Zorn, at the very least, signaled a willingness to publish wildly inaccurate and deliberate misinterpretations of the judge’s decision, consciously misdirect readers from the truth or facts of the case, lie by omission or, at most, revealed themselves as simple and straightforward fibbers. Journalists who have painstakingly labored to create an unrelentingly gloomy portrait of policing in Chicago, both Mitchell’s and Zorn’s wrath with Stephenson’s verdict absolving the three accused men lay in the fact the ruling damaged their selected narrative a “code of silence” exists in the police department, it utterly demolished the media fiction police officers were aggressors when confronting the armed teen, and it upheld valid police fears the armed McDonald’s peculiar behavior could have led to an abrupt assault on a police officer or harm inflicted on a defenseless civilian. More broadly, both Mitchell’s and Zorn’s agitation with the verdict rests in their eagerness to witness the resumption of the steady drumbeat of foment against Chicago police officers, with all the associated demagoguery from the anti-police movement alleging sweeping corruption, blatant misconduct, and shameless racism cascading through the Chicago Police Department.

As Chicago recovers from the misfortune over McDonald’s death, there is another tragic consequence to the matter, one which will never be told by Chicago’s irresponsible media: Three men, police officers, were wrongfully accused of crimes. For former Officer Walsh and former Detective March, the McDonald incident unjustly brought about a blunt end to their careers. For Officer Gaffney, his career will continue, but under a cloud largely created by the carelessness of Chicago journalists.

Grotesque journalistic malpractice, one valuable lesson learned from Ms. Mitchell’s and Mr. Zorn’s columns tarnishing Judge Stephenson’s ruling could not be clearer: Do not believe a word they write.

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