A Chicago white policeman, convicted in October of the murder of fourteen years earlier a black teenager on which he had shot sixteen times, was sentenced Friday to nearly seven years in prison, the judge said Friday. "My findings are that an appropriate sentence would be 81 months in an Illinois penitentiary, followed by two years of conditional release," Justice Vincent Gaughan said.
The sentence was handed down at the end of a day of hearings, during which witnesses of the prosecution said that they had been the victims of abuse by the police officer and the defense witnesses. particular members of his family, including his wife.
The teenager shot from a distance and without reason. Jason Van Dyke was convicted in October 2018 of shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald at a distance without cause, while he was holding a knife. The twelve jurors had delivered their verdict the day after the beginning of their deliberations after a ten-day trial, convicting him of murder instead of murder.
Placed in custody at the end of the verdict. They also convicted him of 16 other charges of aggravated use of a firearm, but acquitted him of malpractice. Upon the announcement of this verdict, the former police officer's parole had been revoked and he had been detained.
A video had exacerbated the anger. The very late release in 2015 of a video showing the teenager's death had exacerbated the public's anger, triggering months of protests in the third largest city in the United States. In the aftermath, prosecutions were opened against Jason Van Dyke, while the city police chief and the prosecutor in charge of the investigation were thanked.
The images, filmed by a camera mounted on the dashboard of a police car, show Jason Van Dyke shoot at the teenager, who is several meters away, and continue to empty his charger even once the young man on the ground. The police officer had been prosecuted only after the revelation of these images. None of the nine other officers present had used his weapon.
Recurrent police abuse. The US Department of Justice had launched an investigation into the Chicago police. It concluded that the police abuses were recurrent in this city and that they were protected by a "code of silence". The city of Chicago signed a civil settlement in 2015 with the teenager's family for $ 5 million.