Criticisms of Sam Shipp, the lone holdout juror in the trial for the murder of Chicago Police Officer Michael Ceriale, have “created a hostile and dangerous environment” not only for Shipp, but also for others who may be called for jury duty, the president of the Cook County Bar Association charged Wednesday.
R. Delacy Peters Jr., president of the bar association, the nation’s oldest black attorney organization, said comments by Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Police Supt. Terry Hillard that Jonathan Tolliver, 19, should have been convicted have so deeply “polluted” the legal atmosphere that a fair retrial is not possible.
More Top Picks Forks Plant
“It is unconscionable that the city’s chief executive officer, the mayor, and it’s chief law enforcement officer, the police superintendent, would, through their pronouncement of the defendant’s guilt, issue a verdict of guilty against a person who is still awaiting a jury verdict,” Peters said at a news conference.
In a separate news conference at the Robert Taylor Homes public housing complex, Tolliver family members also denounced Daley and Hillard and demanded that prosecutors drop charges against Tolliver and release him from jail.
“How dare they pass judgment on my child,” Tolliver’s mother, Shewanda, said in a prepared statement read by a family spokesman.
Peters, joined by former Illinois Appellate Judge R. Eugene Pincham and other bar association members, said that comments such as Daley’s that Tolliver should have been convicted, “have tainted the process … and rendered it impossible for Tolliver to receive a fair trial anywhere within the state.”
Lawyers for Tolliver, who is awaiting a retrial on the murder charge, declined to comment on whether they would seek to move the case out of Cook County.
Also on Wednesday, prosecutors filed a motion asking that Tolliver be sentenced as an adult for the single drug possession charge on which he was convicted. Tolliver was 16 at the time Ceriale was shot in 1998, but he was tried as an adult under the automatic transfer law, which allows juveniles charged with murder to be tried in an adult court, where they face stiffer penalties if convicted.
But because there was no conviction on the murder count, prosecutors are asking that he be sentenced as an adult on the drug charge instead of returning to Juvenile Court for sentencing.
Lawyers for Tolliver were granted time to file arguments opposing the state’s motion. If sentenced as a adult, Tolliver would face 4 to 15 years in adult prison. If sentenced as a juvenile on the drug charge, he would face a sentence ranging from probation to incarceration in a juvenile facility until he is 21.
Shipp, 63, attended the bar association news conference and declined to answer specific questions. He read a brief statement that said, in part, “I was not controlled in the jury room.”
After Cook County Circuit Judge Dennis Porter declared a mistrial last week, Shipp contended that his fellow jurors called him “murder lover” and “gangbanger lover” and urged him to convict Tolliver because “we owe it to the Ceriale family.” Shipp said he followed Porter’s instructions and determined that the evidence was not sufficient to convict.
Some of the 11 jurors who voted to convict denied calling Shipp names and contended that he declined to participate fully in the deliberations after declaring almost immediately that he had doubts about Tolliver’s guilt.
“Mr. Shipp has been threatened, ridiculed, scorned, vilified simply because he had a reasonable doubt as to the defendant’s guilt, and he was man enough to do the right thing as instructed by the judge in the case,” Peters said. “We ask our jurors to do a lot and they do a lot, but rarely have we asked them to become whipping boys.”
Pincham added, “It is my opinion that the atmosphere has been so polluted for a conviction via the chief political officers of Cook County … The reality is that because [Shipp] took a position does not warrant that this man be vilified.”
Peters also was critical of the more than 200 police officers who appeared in court in uniform on Feb. 4 in the belief that a verdict had been reached. The jury had not reached a decision, but it was brought into the courtroom briefly and one juror later said that she began to weep after making eye contact with Ceriale’s family.
“We are sick and tired of the use of such tactics by the police to intimidate and obviously influence juries,” Peters said.
Hillard, who issued a statement after the mistrial that said in part that the department was “disappointed” with the decision, said Wednesday, “I know the comments I made. I said there’s nothing in the constitution that [forbids] us as a family from going over to 26th and California to support the Ceriale family. That’s in our custom, that’s our makeup and we’ll continue to do it.”