Chicago journalist faces showdown over police sources
CHICAGO — If not for the reporting of Jamie Kalven, an independent journalist in Chicago, the world might never have known the name Laquan Mcdonald, a black teenager who was shot 16 times by a police officer as he walked down a street holding a folding knife.
Kalven questioned the official police account of the shooting and revealed the existence of a police dashboard-camera video that documented the episode. Months and many court fights later, Chicago city officials were forced to release the video of the shooting, which showed Mcdonald, 17, being shot again and again one night in 2014, even after he lay crumpled on the street.
Three years later, Kalven finds himself forced back into the case, subpoenaed by lawyers for the police officer, Jason Van Dyke, who was charged with first-degree murder in Mcdonald’s death.
He has been called to appear next month at a pretrial court hearing in which Van Dyke’s lawyers are seeking to learn the source of the information that Kalven published about the shooting long before the video was made public.
It is the latest diversion from the central question of Van Dyke’s guilt or innocence, and another delay in what is now the most closely watched murder case in Chicago.
On a single day two years ago, Van Dyke was charged in the shooting, the graphic video of the teenager’s death from a year earlier was released and Chicago erupted in protest.
Since then, the case has slowly crawled toward resolution. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty but no trial date has been set. The venue of the trial — whether here or in a more distant county in Illinois — is a matter of contention. And it remains to be seen whether the case will be decided in a bench trial or by a jury.
The showdown with Kalven was prompted by Van Dyke’s lawyer, who suggested that Kalven obtained leaked documents and may have passed along that information to witnesses of the shoot-