The Tribune Takes Its Chances With a Jury
Knight was again in the paper’s crosshairs when reporters Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong wrote on January 12, 1999: “Thousands of pages of testimony from the DuPage 7 grand jury and court documents paint a picture of a prosecution that was constructed with lies and half-truths, buttressed with distorted evidence and, according to the indictment, stitched together with criminal misconduct.”
Halfway through the story Possley and Armstrong made this reference to the Du Page 7 grand jury: “As the [first Cruz] trial approached, lead prosecutor Thomas Knight summoned John Gorajczyk, a shoe print examiner in the sheriff’s police crime lab, to discuss his examination of Buckley’s boots, according to the grand jury transcripts. [Stephen Buckley was one of Cruz’s two codefendants.] Earlier, Gorajczyk had compared Buckley’s boots to the print on the Nicarico door and concluded they didn’t match. He did not write any report about his findings. Gorajczyk told the DuPage grand jury that Knight told him to keep his mouth shut about his conclusion and not to tell anyone that there was no written report.”
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Knight: “Was it not your responsibility to read the article, since you were the person providing the information that was going into print, to make sure that it was accurate?”
Possley: “I did not.”
Knight hopes to persuade a jury that the Gorajczyk passage was a small but telling moment in a no-holds-barred Tribune campaign against guardians of the law. He wants the jury to think long and hard about the memo Armstrong wrote on February 6, 1997, proposing the series that became “Trial & Error.” That memo, sent to metro editor Paul Weingarten, began: “History offers so many examples of prosecutors committing flagrant misconduct–of soliciting testimony they know to be a lie; of refusing to disclose information that would help prove a defendant’s innocence; of even forging documents to shore up an otherwise shaky case.
