CHICAGO _ A former Chicago police officer was found guilty Friday of second-degree murder in a fatal off-duty shooting of an unarmed man in 2017.
In announcing his decision, Cook County Judge William Gamboney said that then-Officer Lowell Houser's belief that he acted in self-defense when he shot Jose Nieves was not objectively reasonable.
Houser, who had been free on an electronic monitor since his arrest shortly after the shooting in January 2017, was taken into custody shortly after Gamboney's ruling to await his sentencing next year.
Prosecutors had charged Houser with first-degree murder, but Gamboney opted to convict him of second-degree murder, a lesser offense that carries a sentence of probation or four to 20 years in prison.
Criminal charges against Chicago police officers in shootings, on- or off-duty, are rare. And convictions are even rarer.
Police said shortly after the incident that Houser, then 60, shot Nieves after a verbal altercation on the Northwest Side. The officer and Nieves had argued in the past, police said.
At his trial in October, prosecutors argued the slaying was unprovoked, while Houser's attorneys maintained he fired in self-defense.
The case posed a key test for State's Attorney Kim Foxx, who had been on the job for only about a month and a half when her office announced the high-profile murder charges against the officer.
Like the vast majority of Chicago police officers charged with wrongdoing, Houser _ a 28-year department veteran who was on medical leave at the time of the shooting _ opted to have his fate decided by a judge, not a jury.
Houser chose not to take the stand in his own defense, despite his contention that the shooting was in self-defense.
At trial, a Spanish-speaking eyewitness testified through an interpreter that he saw the two men talking or arguing on opposite sides of the street moments before the shooting. But his testimony came off at times as muddled _ perhaps because of a language barrier or because he saw the shooting from the window of a nearby residence while watching television.
He had turned away from the window toward his television when he heard the first shot fired, he testified, leaving Houser himself as the apparent only living witness to those crucial moments just before the shooting.
Without an eyewitness to directly contradict the defense assertion that Nieves was threatening to shoot the off-duty officer, prosecutors relied on other supporting evidence to fill in the blanks.
Nieves had his coat off and shirt tucked into his pants, witnesses have said, indicating that Houser should have known he was unarmed.
Without Houser testifying, his attorneys sought to show his point of view through the testimony of a Chicago police detective who briefly interviewed the off-duty officer after the shooting.
Houser told the detective that he saw Nieves reach toward the back of his waist after threatening to shoot him and torch his car. Thinking that Nieves was reaching for a gun, Houser told the detective he opened fire.
In closing arguments, Assistant State's Attorney Kenneth Goff scoffed at that claim.
"I wish I had a dollar for every case where officers are claiming they know this guy is a gangbanger and he reached for his waistband," he said. "That's the playbook, and that's the playbook he was playing out of."
