March 19--It's impossible to read State's Attorney Anita Alvarez's defeat in Tuesday's primary election as anything but a brutal rebuke of her handling of the Laquan McDonald case.
Throughout the campaign, Alvarez's opponents had hammered her relentlessly for taking more than a year to charge a white Chicago police officer with murder after he shot the black teenager 16 times. Alvarez insisted she had pursued the case with vigor, that she would change little or nothing if she had it to do over.
Voters clearly wanted someone else to finish the job. They picked challenger Kim Foxx over Alvarez by almost 30 percentage points.
Alvarez is still the prosecutor -- Foxx faces Republican Christopher Pfannkuche in the Nov. 8 general election -- but there's little chance the McDonald case will be resolved before the office changes hands.
Chicago can't wait. Alvarez should ask a judge to turn the case over to a special prosecutor who can steer it through these months of transition and beyond.
The lasting uproar over McDonald's death is more than a community's rage over the shooting of a young black man by a cop whose disciplinary record should have served as a warning. It's about a longstanding distrust of the criminal justice system, a long history of cops covering for cops while the political class looks the other way.
Alvarez is a casualty of that backlash. She owes her defeat to the overwhelming public perception that she dragged her feet rather than file charges against a police officer.
Within days of the shooting, she'd obtained the police dashboard camera video that showed McDonald walking briskly away from police when he was gunned down by Officer Jason Van Dyke on Oct. 20, 2014. She also possessed written statements from other officers at the scene that were soundly contradicted by the video.
Thirteen months passed before a judge ordered the video released to the public and Alvarez hurriedly charged Van Dyke with first-degree murder. She blamed the delay on federal prosecutors, whose parallel investigation of the McDonald shooting is still inching along. To be clear: The U.S. attorney is involved because Alvarez whistled him in, so no, she wasn't trying to sweep the case under the rug. But we might still be waiting for charges -- Van Dyke might still be collecting a paycheck -- if the video hadn't been shaken loose.
