CHICAGO _ In a stunning decision, a Cook County judge on Thursday acquitted three Chicago police officers of all charges alleging they lied in police reports and conspired to cover up the controversial 2014 police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
The case has been seen as a referendum on a so-called code of silence within the Chicago Police Department designed to protect fellow officers from accountability for wrongdoing.
The highly anticipated ruling by Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson comes more than a month after closing arguments in the officers' bench trial.
Former Detective David March, former Officer Joseph Walsh and Officer Thomas Gaffney were charged in an indictment in 2017 with lying in police reports to exaggerate the threat posed by McDonald.
The October 2014 shooting was captured in a now-infamous police dashboard camera video that showed Officer Jason Van Dyke shoot McDonald 16 times as the black teen walked from police down Pulaski Road holding a small folding knife.
March, Walsh and Gaffney later submitted paperwork, however, that described McDonald as the aggressor, and Van Dyke and other officers as the victims of a battery.
They were each charged with official misconduct, obstructing justice and conspiracy.
It's believed to be the first time any Chicago police officer has faced criminal charges stemming from an alleged cover-up of an on-duty shooting.
Van Dyke was convicted in a historic jury trial in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm. He is scheduled to be sentenced Friday by Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan.
Stephenson, a former Cook County prosecutor, heard five days of testimony in the conspiracy case against Van Dyke's former colleagues in November and December. She has since delayed issuing her ruling twice _ first in mid-December and then again earlier this month _ without explanation.
The official misconduct charge carries the most serious potential penalty _ up to five years in prison. But all of the charges include probation as a potential sentence if Stephenson finds any of the officers guilty.
Unlike Van Dyke's trial, which unfolded in a circuslike atmosphere and drew news media from across the country, the conspiracy case was decidedly more low-key, centering mostly on dry police reports and other documents produced in the investigation of McDonald's killing.
During the trial, special prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes and her team repeatedly alleged that the dashcam video was all the evidence needed to show that the officers' police reports painting McDonald as the aggressor were patently false.
March, who headed up the investigation, wrote reports stating McDonald had attacked officers before Van Dyke opened fire, while Gaffney and Walsh each submitted tactical response and battery reports claiming they had been assaulted by the teen.
"This should have been a homicide investigation," assistant special prosecutor Ronald Safer said in closing arguments in December. "Instead, Detective March shaped it from the first minute as an aggravated battery investigation with the soon-to-be deceased as the perpetrator ... and the officers _ including the officer who killed him _ as the victims."
Attorneys for the three officers ridiculed the case as weak and politically motivated, brought by a special prosecutor in the midst of the ongoing fallout over McDonald's killing after the court-ordered release of the dashcam video caused a political firestorm.
March's attorney, James McKay, said in his opening statement that the blame for delaying the release of the video lay with politicians, not the police.
"Those decisions are made by people downtown in City Hall _ people who might be running for election," he said in a thinly veiled reference to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
One of the trial's key witnesses was Officer Dora Fontaine, who testified for prosecutors that March fabricated statements attributed to her saying that McDonald had tried to attack the police with the knife.
"I started cursing, saying what the f---," Fontaine said of her reaction when March's report was made public in December 2015. "I was upset because I had not said that. ... It was a lie."
Fontaine said her denials made her an outcast in her own department. Some called her a rat, a traitor and a snitch, she said, and implied they wouldn't back her up on the street. The situation became so fraught that, she said, her supervisors pulled her from patrol and assigned her to paid desk duty.
"If I was at a call and I needed assistance, some officers felt strong enough to say that I didn't deserve to be helped," she testified.
The officers' attorneys cast Fontaine as a liar and an opportunist who has given conflicting statements under oath over the years.
Gaffney, among the first officers on the scene that night, has been on desk duty since the indictment came down. March and Walsh, who was Van Dyke's partner, resigned after the city inspector general's office released a report recommending they be fired for their actions in the McDonald investigation.
