The judgment, rendered in a tense, cramped courtroom overflowing with spectators, was delivered by a judge and not a jury. Speaking from the bench for close to an hour, Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson rejected the prosecutors’ arguments that the officers had shooed away witnesses and then created a narrative to justify the 2014 shooting, which prompted citywide protests, the firing of the police chief and a wide-ranging federal investigation into the police force.
The ruling came more than three months after Officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted in October of the second-degree murder of Laquan McDonald, and on the afternoon before he was scheduled to be sentenced for a killing that was captured on an infamous police dashboard camera video.
The three police officers — David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney — contradicted what the video showed. In it, Van Dyke fires repeatedly at McDonald, who is wielding a knife, as he moves slightly away from the officers and even as he lies crumpled on the ground. Prosecutors cited that footage repeatedly as they built a case against the officers, who are white, on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice.
Stephenson said that even though the officers’ accounts of the shooting differed from the videos, that did not amount to proof that they were lying. “Two people with two different vantage points can witness the same event,” she said, and still describe it differently.
The judge suggested that key witnesses for the prosecution had offered conflicting testimony, and said there was nothing presented at trial that showed the officers had failed to preserve evidence, as the prosecutors had argued. Challenging the point that officers had shooed away a witness as part of a cover-up, the judge said it was not obvious that police had known the witness had seen the shooting.
The officers, who were brought to trial in November, were accused of writing in official reports that McDonald had tried to stab three other officers, saying they saw him trying to get up from the ground even after a barrage of shots.
March, Walsh and Gaffney each denied that they conspired to come up with a narrative that might justify Van Dyke’s decision to shoot McDonald. None of them fired any shots that night. Other officers, too, had witnessed the shooting and had given questionable accounts, but were not on trial; grand jurors indicted the three officers but declined to indict any others.
It was “undisputed and undeniable,” Stephenson said, that McDonald had ignored officers’ commands to drop his knife. While she spoke, the three officers sat silently, sometimes staring down at the carpet or nervously jiggling a leg. After she read the verdict, several people broke into applause.
Todd Pugh, a lawyer for Walsh, said afterward that the judge had acted with courage in rendering her verdict, despite what he called public pressure to find the officers guilty. “There never ever was a case,” he told reporters, adding that the grand jury had proved the axiom that it would indict a ham sandwich if given the opportunity.
Walsh, who was Van Dyke’s partner on the night of the shooting and who has resigned from the department, said little. The experience has been “heartbreaking for my family,” he said. “A year and a half.”
But many others were outraged.
“The verdict says to police officers that you can lie, cheat, steal, rape, rob and pillage, and it’s OK,” said the Rev. Marvin Hunter, who is McDonald’s great-uncle.
A group of ministers who gathered at the courthouse denounced the outcome. The Rev. Leon Finney, a pastor on Chicago’s South Side, called it a “travesty.”
“There was clearly evidence from the video that Laquan McDonald was not attacking or seeking to attack any of the law enforcement officers,” Finney said. “How could they all three make up a story indicating that Laquan was threatening their lives?”
Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president who is a candidate for mayor, called the decision “a devastating step backward.”
“Laquan’s murder has become a part of the fabric of our city,” she said. “The verdict today does not serve justice in wake of the senseless loss of a young life.”
Speaking to reporters at the courthouse, Patricia Brown Holmes, the special prosecutor, said that while she disagreed with the judge’s ruling, she hoped that the trial had sent a message.
Holmes said she hoped that “others will think twice before engaging in conduct that might land them in an investigation such as this.”
“Hopefully one day there won’t be a code of silence,” she said.
Along with the officers, the broad concept of a police code of silence was on trial in Chicago, where officers have been accused for decades of covering up their colleagues’ misconduct.
As in other cities, residents have long complained that police officers stuck together when it came to accounting for their actions, and the issue has come up in cases involving drunken driving, the beating of a bartender and a lawsuit by two officers who said they faced retaliation after breaking the code. Even the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has acknowledged it.
In a speech in 2015, 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.”
March, who also resigned, had been assigned to investigate the shooting. He merely wrote down what the witnesses told him had happened, a lawyer for March told the court during trial. Gaffney was one of the officers who first confronted McDonald on the evening of the shooting, after police got a report of a man breaking into trucks on the city’s Southwest Side. He and other officers had followed the teenager, who was carrying a knife and ignoring orders to stop, for several blocks.
In a statement, Emanuel and Eddie Johnson, superintendent of the Chicago Police, vowed that their work to improve the department would not stop.
“We will continue to take concrete steps to restore trust with communities across Chicago,” the statement said, “because trust is the best public safety tool we have.”
There were no protests after the verdicts were read, and William Calloway, a prominent Chicago activist who is running for City Council, urged Chicagoans to refrain. “To the black community, I know this hurts,” he said on Twitter. “We know this was a cover-up. I’m not saying take to the streets anymore. It’s time for us to take to the polls.”
“That blue code of silence is just not with the Chicago Police Department: It expands to the judicial system,” Calloway said at a news conference.
With the final chapter of the McDonald case — a killing that came amid a national conversation about police shootings of black people — scheduled for Friday, a Facebook group implored a “call to action.” “In room 500 at 9 a.m., show up to stand in solidarity with organizers and the family of Laquan McDonald as we demand, again, #Justice4Laquan.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.