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player ready...On Oct. 9, a Cook County jury found that the city of Chicago was not liable for the death of a 55-year-old woman, Dominga Flores Gomez, who was struck by a driver being chased by police. The jury found instead that the responsibility lay with Juan C. Vazquez, the man fleeing police in a stolen car. It was Vazquez, later convicted of reckless homicide and sentenced to 14 years in prison, who killed Gomez.
The city had been sued by Gomez’s family, represented by the Chicago law firm of Power Rogers, alleging that the police were to blame due to how they had conducted the chase. The city’s law department recommended that the city pay up and settle the case. Indeed, Ald. Raymond Lopez (15th) asserted that the law department had said there was a risk of a verdict in excess of $30 million if the case was allowed to go to trial.
But the city council’s Finance Committee balked at the city lawyers’ recommendation to pay even $8.25 million to settle the matter before trial. They refused to authorize the settlement and the case went to trial with the city reportedly expending $700,000 on legal fees (a lot less than $8.25 million) and the jury vindicating the council’s decision.
Tuesday, the Tribune reported that Mayor Brandon Johnson is expected to propose borrowing $480 million to pay for police-related lawsuit settlements in the budget coming Wednesday.
That is, to say the least, an enormous amount of money at this debt-challenged moment, a reminder of the cost of settling cases like the one above, a tragedy for Gomez’s family, especially since Vazquez had no resources to provide any compensation.
Let’s be clear. There are legitimate police misconduct cases that result in victims both demanding and deserving compensation; in a city this size, they will never be completely eradicated. A fair reading of history also requires acknowledging the fatal 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald, which led to the conviction of Officer Jason Van Dyke on charges of 2nd degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, and also to both a 2017 Department of Justice report that found the Chicago Police Department had a “pattern and practice” of police brutality and abuse and the 2019 Consent Decree.
Much of that $480 million, Johnson has signaled, is earmarked for the so-called “global settlement” for 17 plaintiffs framed for murders by the notorious former Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara. These plaintiffs ended up spending a combined 383 years in prison. City Council voted to approve those payments last week; other cases are pending, potentially sucking up this entire sum.
So that costly figure is by no means all about settling cases that should not be settled; it is very much about the most costly disgraced detective in the history of the Chicago Police Department. It’s also true that it is the job of the law department to protect the city from the dangers of a massive jury verdict, not to mention the costs of defending cases. One jury, after all, is one jury.
But the broader issue stands. Attorneys are opportunistic, and when you have outside attorneys on both sides of a case, logic would suggest there will be more motivation to settle in a congenial way.
We’ve argued in the past, and we will argue again today, that sometimes settling only encourages more lawsuits, especially when the cases get more and more tenuous.
This past April, following a Tribune investigation, we expressed the view that the city had to get a handle on its massive spending on outside attorneys hired to address police misconduct and wrongful conviction lawsuits. In March, we wrote about a case that was separate but not dissimilar to the one detailed above in which Mayor Brandon Johnson’s law department had decided to settle for some $27 million. And, perhaps most egregious of all, there was the matter of the controversial $1.25 million settlement to compensate the family of Dexter Reed, shot to death by police officers after Reed shot first at police officers during a traffic stop and wounded one of them. We editorialized about that in April of last year.
If cases involving people shooting at and fleeing from police result in large settlements, that hardly is a disincentive for such behavior. We were glad to see at least one jury hold that line.
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