Mayor Daley’s so concerned about rogue cops that he got the City Council to put the police department’s Office of Professional Standards under his direct control, and he’s appointed a lawyer from California to run it. “I say we need to take this step and give it time to work,” said the mayor the other day.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“The public has a significant interest in monitoring the conduct of its police officers and a right to know how allegations of misconduct are being investigated and handled,” Lefkow reasoned as she granted Kalven’s motion on July 2. The mayor couldn’t have put it better himself. Yet the city immediately appealed, and the Seventh Circuit Appellate Court ordered a stay of Lefkow’s ruling. The city’s one concession to openness so far has been to give the names of the officers to the City Council.
If you hoped the city would react to Marlan’s article, it did. It went to court to try to shut the lawyers up. In a motion filed in federal court June 20 asking for unspecified sanctions, the city said Loevy and Antholt had violated a local federal court rule governing “trial publicity.” According to Local Rule 83.53.6, “a lawyer shall not make an extrajudicial statement the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is likely to be disseminated by public media and, if so disseminated, would pose a serious and imminent threat to the fairness of an adjudicative proceeding.”
Given that a trial is far off, the law firm argued, and given that lawyers, just like all other Americans, “have a strong First Amendment right to speak out about evidence suggesting government abuses,” and further given that Loevy & Loevy had already called the two police officers liars in court documents and therefore was merely repeating itself in Marlan’s article, “Defendants’ brief must be seen for what it really is: a misguided and unsupportable attempt to enlist judicial support in silencing critics of the police department.”
If times were better, I asked him, and the Reader were still making money hand over fist, do you think you’d all be so ready to call it quits? Roth thought about that awhile. “Yes, I do. But I think that’s because we’re ready to retire,” he said at last.
