Federal judge sanctions prosecutor's office for bad faith in police misconduct case
A federal judge has sanctioned a former assistant state prosecutor and her office for bad faith in connection with a Chicago police misconduct case.
At issue were files maintained by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office concerning misdemeanor arrests of a Chicago man that he and his lawyer sought to discover in a subsequent federal civil rights case, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Daniel Martinez was arrested, along with five other family members, at a 2008 barbecue, the civil suit says. None were convicted, and after the civil rights suit was filed, Martinez was arrested on another misdemeanor charge, which he and his family said was in retaliation for the litigation. Martinez was acquitted in a January 2013 bench trial.
That same day, his lawyer, Jared Kosoglad, filed a subpoena seeking the prosecution’s files. However, he was later told they had been destroyed immediately afterward in accord with the office’s standard policy for non-jury misdemeanor cases. Another lawyer who had asked in 2012 for the 2008 prosecution files was also told they did not exist, the newspaper recounts.
Kosoglad said the file-destruction policy appears to conflict with state law and, after additional argument by both sides, U.S. District Judge John F. Grady eventually allowed Kosoglad to search himself for the prosecution files for Martinez. Kosoglad told Grady he quickly located the 2008 files in a box of 2010 files.
After the case settled last year for $100,000 plus attorney fees, Grady rebuked the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and an individual prosecutor. The judge said he was troubled the office had incorrectly described its document-retention policy, did not follow its own document-retention policy and “obstructed … the court’s attempts to understand the true state of affairs.”
The judge has not yet ruled on whether he will award an additional $35,500 in legal fees sought by Martinez’s lawyer in a December filing, according to the article.
Responding to the Tribune’s request for comment, a spokeswoman for the office provided a written statement:
“Generally speaking, it is extremely rare for a judge to order sanctions against assistant state’s attorneys, and we are disappointed in the judge’s conclusion that this was a sanctionable offense. While there may have been a misunderstanding or mistake made with respect to record-keeping in this particular case, we believe that [the sanctioned prosecutor] had a good-faith basis to believe that her statements to the court were truthful.”
