Chicago officer acquitted of putting gun in suspect’s mouth

The prosecution’s case rested on a couple of planks: the testimony of the arrestee, Rickey Williams, who said Evans brutalized him, and the DNA from Williams found on Evans’ gun.

“I think Mr. Ando is a very intelligent man, but he clearly did not have command or control of his organization”, said Dean Morask, an attorney for Evans.

The judge also pointed to varying accounts of descriptions of the police officer’s appearance. The judge concluded that the DNA could be explained by lawful contact, and that Williams’ testimony “taxes the gullibility of the credulous”. The defense said Williams resisted arrest and added that they never saw Evans threat him with a gun or a Taser.

Evans did not testify in the three-day bench trial.

“Law and order” was finally handed down two years after Evans allegedly shoved his gun in the mouth of 25-year old Ricky Williams and pressed a stun gun against him. Both men are black.

Cannon said she didn’t find Williams’ story believable, accusing him of changing it repeatedly and of offering to change it if it would help investigators.

They point out that Williams’ DNA was found on Evans’ service weapon and that the city’s main police oversight agency, the Independent Police Review Authority, recommended that Evans be relieved of his police powers over the incident. He says Evans must have mistaken a cellphone he had been holding for a weapon. Williams for years alleged that Evans held a gun in his left hand and a Taser in his right hand until prosecutors told Williams earlier this year that Evans wore his gun holster on his right hip. Authorities said Johnson was armed with a 9mm gun with an extended clip, but his family rebuffs that claim and plans to sue the police department. “His testimony was – as the Supreme Court stated in People vs. Puolson, unreasonable, improbable and contrary to the human experience”, Cannon said.

Evans is a highly-decorated Chicago police officer who has also been the subject of more than four dozen citizen complaints in his 28 years of service. Wiping the gun would remove Evans’ touch DNA but left behind Williams’ harder-to-remove DNA from saliva in the weapon’s nooks and crannies, she said. In the McDonald case, her critics note it to took Alvarez 13 months to charge Van Dyke, and that charge was only announced after a judge forced the Emanuel administration to make public the dashcam video of the incident. Dante Servin was charged with involuntary manslaughter and other charges in the shooting death of an unarmed black woman in 2012, but in April a judge suggested that prosecutors filed the wrong charges against the officer and acquitted him.

Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, whose resignation protesters have been clamoring for, issued a statement defending her decision to charge Evans.

The latest on the trial of a Chicago police commander accused of shoving his gun down a suspect’s throat (all times local). He was “eager to change his testimony at anyone’s request to accommodate the evidence”, she said.

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