Doubt cast over police testimony
Judges questioned 3 officers’ credibility, Chicago prosecutors tell defense lawyers in 13 criminal cases.
CHICAGO — Cook County prosecutors recently notified defense lawyers in at least 10 criminal cases that a judge had found the court testimony of a veteran Chicago police officer to be false, a determination about the officer’s credibility that could affect the cases as they move to trial.
The state’s attorney’s office also told defense lawyers in at least three other cases that another Cook County judge had cast doubt on testimony from two other officers, raising questions about those cases as well.
Prosecutors notified the lawyers through a type of court filing commonly called a disclosure notice, after a Chicago Tribune investigation in May found police were rarely punished when a judge found they had testified falsely or in a way that raised questions about their credibility.
The state’s attorney’s office, in fact, had done nothing about any of the officers’ testimony until the Tribune raised questions about the cases. The office then issued the disclosure notices, which the Tribune obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Although prosecutors should routinely file the notices when judges make adverse credibility findings about officers’ testimony, a number of longtime criminal defense lawyers said in interviews that they had never received one or even heard of them. Veteran Judge William Hooks even summoned a supervisor in the state’s attorney’s office to his courtroom recently to explain the notices after a defense lawyer received one in a case before him.
The state’s attorney’s office alerted the Police Department about the most recent notices, following new protocol it established after the Tribune investigation. The department had already launched an internal affairs inquiry and sought to talk with judges about the officers’ testimony.
The judges told internal affairs investigators that any transcripts memorializing the officers’ testimony “speak for themselves,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
“These investigations remain open and internal affairs is conferring with the state’s attorney and searching for objective, verifiable evidence for possible rule violations,” Guglielmi said.
The disclosure notices filed in court in May and June concern three officers, all of whom were identified in the Tribune investigation: Jorge Martinez, James Lynch and Wahbe Askar. The notices told defense lawyers that Hooks found Martinez to have falsely testified in one case and that Judge Joseph Claps had questioned Lynch’s and Askar’s credibility in separate cases. The disclosure notices could be filed in every case in which the officers are listed as potential prosecution witnesses.
Martinez, Askar and Lynch could not be reached for comment.
The disclosure notices regarding Martinez stem from a major drug case in 2013, in which he said he and a colleague abandoned an undercover surveillance operation to stop a minivan on Chicago’s southwest side that had turned without signaling. The officers found a $50,000 brick of cocaine in the vehicle.
Hooks, who presided over the drug case, at a 2015 hearing called Martinez’s testimony “a very clear falsehood.” The judge said he did not believe that the officers would break from drug surveillance to make a routine traffic stop and threw out the evidence, according to a hearing transcript. That prompted prosecutors to drop the case. Hooks demanded prosecutors explain why Martinez was not being investigated criminally for his testimony.
The state’s attorney’s office recently filed additional disclosure notices in cases involving Lynch and Askar, who testified in front of Claps in separate cases involving gun seizures.
Claps made it clear that he found the officers’ testimony lacking credibility, transcripts show. He said in August 2015 that he did not “believe for a second” a key part of Askar’s testimony. In January, he said that Lynch’s testimony was not “credible or believable.” The rulings led the prosecutor in both cases to dismiss the charges.
Hooks summoned a state’s attorney supervisor to his courtroom in the case of Gregory Fikes, who was arrested after police in March 2015 seized about $43,000 worth of marijuana. At a hearing in late May, Hooks quizzed Assistant State’s Atty. Jennifer Coleman about the disclosure notice involving Martinez. The judge said he had talked with colleagues as well as with some defense lawyers; none, he suggested, had ever received one.
Fikes’ lawyer, Jayne Ingles, said in an interview that Martinez had obtained a search warrant based on information that he said was from a confidential informant. Ingles said that she was skeptical an informant existed, and hoped to use the disclosure notice to attack Martinez’s credibility as the case moves forward.