Nearly a year after former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke was found guilty of the murder of Laquan McDonald, a Cook County judge Wednesday lifted an order sealing all records in the case and released a two-inch thick stack of heavily redacted legal filings that represent the last 18 documents that were previously unavailable.
Shortly after the historic case was assigned Judge Vincent Gaughan in 2016, Gaughan had entered a “decorum order” that required documents in the case to be filed under seal, as well as limiting prosecutors and Van Dyke and his lawyers from speaking publicly about the case. Media organizations, including the Chicago Sun-Times, fought the judge’s blanket sealing of all case records, with the state Appellate Court ordering Gaughan to make public dozens of filings in the months ahead of Van Dyke’s 2018 trial.
Gaughan’s decision to lift the decorum order Wednesday, and prosecutors’ willingness to endorse the move, would also seem to eliminate grounds for other public agencies, such as the Chicago Police Department, to deny public records requests for materials related to the Van Dyke investigation.
The records were unsealed at the request of Special Prosecutor Joseph McMahon, whose office made the redactions to the filings. Lawyers for Van Dyke and the City of Chicago did not oppose unsealing the records. An appeal of a previous ruling by Gaughan to keep the filings under seal indefinitely remains pending, and it was not clear Wednesday what impact the release of the documents — some of them heavily redacted— would have on that litigation.
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Van Dyke was found guilty in October — the first Chicago police officer to be convicted of murder for an on-duty shooting since the 1960s. He was sentenced to just under seven years in prison in January.
The files released Wednesday, some of them entirely redacted, save for the title, include documents in which Van Dyke’s defense team laid out its claims of misconduct by prosecutors during grand jury hearings that led to Van Dyke’s indictment — both the initial charges brought under former State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and a second indictment handed up by a second grand jury empaneled after McMahon took over the case.
Van Dyke’s lawyers argued that Alvarez, who was in the midst of a heated primary election against Kim Foxx in the fall of 2015, only announced charges because of the looming release of dashboard camera video of Van Dyke firing 16 bullets into McDonald. They also said prosecutors failed to tell the grand jury about state laws spelling out circumstances in which police officers are allowed to use deadly force.
“Thus Jason Van Dyke was sacrificed to appease the angry horde,” Van Dyke’s attorney, Dan Herbert wrote in both motions to dismiss.
Almost entirely blacked out were several motions in which the defense submitted outlining the potential testimony of witnesses — including McDonald’s mother — who were involved in violent encounters with McDonald in the months and years before the teen was killed, evidence they said should be allowed to buttress Van Dyke’s claim that the 2014 shooting was self-defense.
