Who knows why it took six weeks for Cook County Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson to write her ruling acquitting the three defendants in the police "code of silence" case.
How long could it have taken her to transcribe and then paraphrase the closing arguments for the defense?
Stephenson's unpersuasive, infuriating 28-page ruling, which she read from the bench Thursday afternoon, embraced the idea that Laquan McDonald posed such a threat to police on a fateful night in 2014 that Officer Jason Van Dyke was justified in firing 16 shots into him. That idea is belied by police dashcam video and was rightly rejected by the jury that in October found Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and multiple counts of aggravated battery with a firearm.
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."
The dashcam video reveals this assertion as tendentious, police-union nonsense, and Stephenson's summary illustrates that the blindfold on Dame Justice isn't always metaphorical.
In report after report, assertion after assertion, police accounts exaggerated McDonald's movements, always in ways that would tend to justify Van Dyke's decision to shoot him.
"The recovered videos do not show the vantage point of Van Dyke, (his partner Joseph) Walsh or others," Stephenson wrote. She dismissed the charge that officers lied and conspired in order to justify the shooting as "speculation."
The legal record will now show, implausibly, that story of the police murder of Laquan McDonald is just the story of a one-off event _ an isolated, regrettable tragedy in which one copper made a terrible split-second decision and paid the price for it. He was sentenced Friday to six years, nine months in prison, but with good behavior he could be out in less than four years.
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.
Several months ago I wrote that McDonald's death was the tragedy and the cover-up was the scandal. Thursday's full-throated judicial exoneration of Van Dyke's department colleagues was the disgrace that caps it all off.
