CHICAGO — Three Chicago police officers were acquitted on Thursday of charges that they covered up for a fellow police officer after he shot and killed Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, a verdict that came as a blow to those who saw the case as a rare moment when officers might be held accountable for a longstanding pattern of defending one another.
Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson, reading her verdict to a Cook County courtroom packed with spectators, dismissed prosecutors’ assertions that the officers had conspired and obstructed justice.
“This court finds that the state has failed to meet its burden on all charges,” Judge Stephenson said.
Along with the three officers, the broad concept of a police “code of silence” was on trial in Chicago, a city where police have been accused for decades of covering up fellow officers’ misconduct.
As in other cities, residents long have complained that police officers stuck together when it came to accounting for their actions, and the issue has bubbled up in cases involving a drunk-driving officer, an off-duty officer’s beating of a bartender and a lawsuit by two police officers who said they faced retaliation after breaking the code. Even the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has acknowledged a “code of silence.”
In a speech in 2015, Mr. Emanuel condemned what he said was a tendency of some officers to ignore, deny and in “some cases cover up the bad actions of a colleague or colleagues.”
This trial of the three officers stemmed from the 2014 death of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a police officer. The shooting was captured on a police dashboard camera video that horrified many Chicagoans, and Officer Van Dyke was convicted in October of second-degree murder in the death.
On Friday, Mr. Van Dyke will appear in a Cook County courtroom to be sentenced for his crimes.
In November, the three other officers were brought to trial. All were accused of lying after the shooting about what had happened, in order to cover up for Officer Van Dyke. Prosecutors said the police had shooed away eyewitnesses to the shooting rather than interview them, wrote in official reports that the teenager had tried to stab three officers, and said they saw him trying to get up from the ground even after the barrage of shots came.
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