INDEPENDENT REPORTER: ‘I’M NOT REVEALING ANY SOURCES’

ing, influencing their accounts to investigators.

The fight over Kalven’s sources threatens to push the start of the trial even further down the road, delaying legal proceedings that many Chicagoans say should have already begun. Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, a local independent news organization, said he is prepared to fight what he sees as a broadside on his First Amendment rights. In a legal filing this month, his lawyer called the effort an “unjustified fishing expedition.” Kalven said in an interview that he is willing to testify — but not about his sources of information.

“The one thing that I’m clear about is that I’m not revealing my sources,” said Kalven, sitting in his office on the South Side this month as silver commuter trains swooshed by in the background. “If we’re going to have a fullblown First Amendment controversy over this, it’s going to take months or years.”

Daniel Herbert, Van Dyke’s lawyer and a former police officer, declined to be interviewed, citing a gag order imposed by Judge Vincent Gaughan of the Cook County Circuit Court. But Herbert’s efforts suggest that he may try to urge the judge to bar witnesses to the shooting from testifying at trial, on the grounds that their recollections were tainted by information Kalven passed along to them.

During a hearing in October, Gaughan noted a suggestion that Kalven may have gotten the name of a shooting witness from someone connected to the Independent Police Review Authority, an agency that, at the time of the shooting, was responsible for investigating claims of misconduct and excessive force by Chicago police officers. “He will be testifying,” the judge said of Kalven, according to The Chicago Sun-times.

Kalven, 69, says he is bewildered to suddenly become a player — and no longer an observer — in the case against Van Dyke.

It has been three years since he first heard the name Laquan Mcdonald. The news of the teenager’s death on the Southwest Side of Chicago on the night of Oct. 20, 2014, received modest coverage in local news media. An article the next day in The Chicago Tribune, citing a police union spokesman, noted that Mcdonald was armed with a knife, behaving erratically. The report said that he had “allegedly lunged at police” before being fatally shot by an officer.

Kalven remembers reading the article. “And then I turned the page,” he said.

But less than a month later, he received a tip from a source, passed along by Craig B. Futterman, a former public defender who runs a civil rights clinic at the University of Chicago. The source said that the Mcdonald shooting was nothing like what had been reported, and that there was dashboard camera video to prove it. The tip led Kalven to a civilian who had seen the entire episode; with some prodding, Kalven persuaded the witness to talk. In January 2015, Kalven obtained the autopsy report — a painstaking record of 16 bullets fired into Mcdonald.

The resulting story, “Sixteen Shots,” which appeared in Slate in February 2015, forced the case out of obscurity in the Police Department and at City Hall and into public view.

The investigation into Mcdonald’s death upended Chicago. The police superintendent, Garry F. Mccarthy, lost his job. So did the head of the Independent Police Review Authority. The mayor, Rahm Emanuel, refused to step down despite calls for his resignation and nightly demonstrations in the city. Anita Alvarez, the state’s attorney for Cook County, lost her re-election bid. The Justice Department opened an investigation into possible civil rights abuses by the Chicago Police Department.

It wasn’t until a year after Mcdonald’s death — and after a judge told the city it had to release the video — that Van Dyke was charged with murder. He was the only officer among more than a half-dozen on the scene to fire a weapon at the teenager. Three other officers were indicted on state felony counts of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice, accused of filing false reports and lying about what happened the night of Mcdonald’s death.

For years, Kalven has investigated government misconduct from his vantage point as an independent journalist from the South Side and as the son of Harry Kalven Jr., a university professor who was an expert on the First Amendment and was known for having defended comedian Lenny Bruce. His father died of a stroke when he was 26; Jamie took over the writing of his father’s unfinished book on the First Amendment, a project that took 12 years.

Later, Kalven turned to investigations of public housing in Chicago, and in 2005 the city tried to force him to give up his notes and other source materials for an article on police misconduct. He refused.

Kalven says he is not sure if he will be forced to testify at next month’s hearing on the Van Dyke case, or if a brief prepared by his lawyer, Matthew Topic, will satisfy the judge.

He says he is more concerned about Van Dyke’s trial, which could begin next spring. In 2015, the release of the video of Mcdonald’s death was a trauma for many Chicagoans and a window into police conduct; the trial is expected to consume the city’s attention.

“I sort of feel like when you swim across a body of water and you can’t see either shore,” Kalven said. “We’re in the middle of a large, historic thing. We could end up in a worse place rather than a better place.”