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A federal judge just ruled that a Chicago attorney lied about concealing evidence in a fatal police shooting
A top attorney for the city of Chicago lied about concealing evidence in a trial over a fatal police shooting, a federal judge ruled Monday.
"Attorneys who might be tempted to bury late-surfacing information need to know that, if discovered, any verdict they win will be forfeit and their clients will pay the price," U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang wrote. "They need to know it is not worth it."
In 2011, officers Raoul Mosqueda and Gildardo Sierra fatally shot Darius Pinex after pulling him over during a routine traffic stop, and testified they did so because his car matched a description from an earlier shooting. This is how the trial went down with the city's attorney Jordan Marsh, according to the Chicago Tribune:
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According to court records, Sierra and Mosqueda did not hear the dispatch as they originally claimed because it aired over a different radio zone. It wasn't until the middle of the trial that Marsh admitted — outside the presence of the jury — that he had failed to turn over a recording of the dispatch that actually went out over the officers' Zone 6 radios that night, a call that talked about a different Oldsmobile Aurora that didn't match Pinex's car and wasn't wanted for a shooting.Marsh first said he'd learned about the recording that day, then later said he had actually found out about it the week before trial. When the judge pressed Marsh on why he hadn't disclosed the existence of the recording as soon as he had learned of it from a police sergeant, the lawyer backpedaled more, saying it hadn't crossed his mind that it would be something that might be helpful to the plaintiffs. [Chicago Tribune]
Chang's ruling comes as Chicago faces heightened scrutiny over their officers' use of force. The Department of Justicelaunched a civil rights investigation into the department in December.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
