Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson, reading her verdict to a Cook County courtroom packed with spectators, dismissed prosecutors’ assertions that the officers had conspired and obstructed justice.
Along with the three officers, the concept of a police “code of silence” was on trial in Chicago, a city where police have been accused for decades of covering up fellow officers’ misconduct.
As in other cities, residents long have complained that police officers stuck together when it came to accounting for their actions. Even the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has acknowledged a “code of silence.”
This trial of the three officers stemmed from the 2014 death of McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a police officer. The shooting was captured on a police dashboard camera video that horrified many Chicagoans, and Van Dyke was convicted in October of second-degree murder in the death.
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On Friday, Van Dyke will appear in a Cook County courtroom to be sentenced.
In November, the three other officers were brought to trial. All were accused of lying after the shooting about what had happened. Prosecutors said police had shooed away eyewitnesses to the shooting rather than interview them, wrote in official reports that the teenager had tried to stab three officers, and said they saw him trying to get up from the ground even after the barrage of shots came.
The officers’ accounts contradicted the video of the shooting, which showed Van Dyke firing repeatedly at McDonald as he moved slightly away from the officers and even as he lay crumpled on the ground. Prosecutors cited that footage repeatedly as they built a case against the officers on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice.
The officers — David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney — denied they conspired to come up with a narrative that might justify Van Dyke’s decision to shoot McDonald.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.