Summary: The lawyer representing the city during a civil wrongful death lawsuit of a police shooting has resigned after it came to light that he hid evidence and lied during the trial.
Chicago’s reputation has taken another hit with the resignation of a lawyer involved in a police shooting trial. The Chicago police superintendent was fired December 1 after public outrage from the police killing of Lacquan McDonald. Top lawyer Jordan Marsh resigned after a judge accused him of hiding evidence and lying during the civil trial of another police shooting.
The trial for Darius Pinex hasn’t received the same media attention as the McDonald case, but the situations are very similar. Pinex was shot at and killed by Officers Gildardo Sierra and Raoul Mosqueda during a traffic stop in 2011. They claimed to have pulled over Pinex because his Oldsmobile Aurora matched a police radio description of a wanted car. The Pinex family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, which was represented by Marsh.
During the trial, the Officers and Marsh argued that Pinex’s car matched the description of a wanted car from another shooting that went out over the police radio, but it has recently come to light that Sierra and Mosqueda couldn’t have heard the radio announcement because it wasn’t aired in the part of Chicago they were in. A different description of a wanted Oldsmobile Aurora had been broadcast where the two officers were driving, but that description included the license plate number which didn’t match Pinex’s number. The second Aurora wasn’t involved in a shooting so there was no reason to treat Pinex as a dangerous suspect.
A city witness in the trial was the one to inform the court about the description that Sierra and Mosqueda would have heard with the call recording. It was then that the court discovered that Marsh knew about this recording but didn’t inform the court or opposing counsel about it.
The jury had ruled in favor of Sierra and Mosqueda, but with the new evidence that Marsh had hidden the evidence from the court, a judge threw out the verdict and ordered a retrial.
Photo: dailymail.co.uk