Charges against former cop suddenly dropped
Under pressure to reveal why they suddenly dropped charges against a former Schaumburg, Ill., police officer accused of stealing and dealing drugs, DuPage County prosecutors told a defense attorney they would share the information privately, the lawyer said.
Publicly, the state’s attorney’s office has remained tight-lipped about why the case against ex-cop John Cichy fell apart last week on the day he was to go to trial, despite evidence that they’d said included surveillance footage of him stealing $20,000 of planted cash from a storage locker.
Now attorneys for two other ex-officers who pleaded guilty in the scheme — and are serving long prison sentences — want answers. State’s Attorney Robert Berlin’s office said it will respond “in a prompt and appropriate manner” but did not specify what evidence might be shared, or when. Berlin said in a statement last week that his office had “insufficient admissible evidence” to convict Cichy, citing “recent developments.”
The reversal in Cichy’s case “will have no impact whatsoever” on the guilty pleas of the other ex-officers, Terrance O’Brien and Matthew Hudak, the statement said.
Heading into trial, the case against Cichy appeared solid, given the other defendants’ admissions of guilt and the evidence, which also included cocaine confiscated from a drug dealer the men allegedly worked with and secretly taped audio recordings of discussions about the scheme, according to court documents and officials. And Cichy was later caught with some of the cash he was seen taking from the storage locker, officials have alleged.
Yet prosecutors ran into obstacles during the five years since the officers were arrested outside Woodfield Mall. Some recorded statements were excluded, the defense was challenging other evidence and a key witness might have been unwilling to testify. And Cichy’s attorney, Jay Fuller, said prosecutors told him there was a discrepancy in the evidence, and that the credibility of a key informant was called into question by his continued drug dealing.
But none of that, on the surface, would appear to be enough to drop the case, according to defense attorneys and a criminal law professor who has no connection to the case.
Professor David Shapiro, director of appellate litigation at the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, called it a “head-scratching” decision.
“I am in no position to know about (Cichy’s) guilt,” he said, “but what’s surprising to me is that there’s a decision not to go forward despite significant evidence.”