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After more than four years of complaints,
controversy, and turmoil, the race-discrimination lawsuit filed by two
now-retired Springfield Police Department officers finally made it into
court last week, only to end two-and-a-half days later in a mistrial. U.S. District Judge Jeanne Scott halted proceedings
last Wednesday, chastising lawyers on both sides for “creating an
ethical minefield.” This week, Scott asked the Illinois Attorney
Registration and Disciplinary Commission to review the lawyers’
conduct. Testimony came to an unexpected finale on the third
day of the trial, with SPD Deputy Chief Rob Williams — the
department’s highest-ranking African-American officer and not a party
to the lawsuit — on the witness stand. Jim Lang, assistant
corporation counsel, asked Williams if he had ever discussed personal
experiences “that might be relevant to this lawsuit” with other
members of the minority-officers group, the Black Guardians Association.
Williams answered yes.
“Did you ever feel pressured to use those items
in relation to this lawsuit?” Lang asked. Before Williams could answer, plaintiffs’
attorney Courtney Cox jumped to his feet and requested a sidebar with the
judge. During that conference, according to the official transcript, Lang
told Scott that Williams had been pressured to lie or exaggerate, and had
been “ostracized” by other black officers “because they
didn’t feel that he had tried hard enough to make his claims
stick” — an allegation Cox denied. What made the accusation ethically troubling was the
fact that Cox, at that moment, was still Williams’ attorney, though
both men seemed to have forgotten that relationship. Williams had been one
of the nine original plaintiffs when the lawsuit was filed in 2003.
Dismissed early on, he no longer considered himself a client of
Cox’s. Cox likewise apparently no longer regarded Williams as a
client — in fact, Cox had, months earlier, attacked his integrity by
assisting another officer in filing an internal affairs complaint against
Williams. Yet neither man had taken steps to formally sever their
attorney/client bond.
Sometime overnight after Williams’ trial
testimony, Cox finally filed a motion withdrawing as Williams’
lawyer. By then, though, the situation had become too tangled, and Judge
Scott declared a mistrial. “A lot of time; an old case; we’re into
the trial; it’s disgusting to have to do this,” she said.
It was the final blow to a case that had been
whittled away bit by bit. Five of the original seven defendants had been
dismissed, leaving only the city of Springfield and its former police
chief, John Harris. The marquee plaintiff, Renatta Frazier, had settled her
case separately, with the city of Springfield paying her and Cox together a
sum of about $850,000 [see “Redemption story,” April 23, 2004].
Six other black officers had been dismissed. The two plaintiffs remaining
— retired SPD lieutenants Rickey Davis and Lea Joy — had lost
many of their claims in pretrial motions. In her opinion granting most of the city’s
motion for summary judgment, Scott scolded attorneys on both sides, noting
that both parties had failed to state obvious legal arguments. For example,
Cox never tried to turn the case into a class-action suit, and the city had
never bothered to invoke the statute of limitations to challenge some of
the plaintiffs’ older claims. Davis and other plaintiffs had
presented evidence of a hostile work environment, Scott wrote, yet Cox
didn’t include that claim for those plaintiffs in his pleadings. Scott also pointed out that the plaintiffs had failed
to provide any proof that their white colleagues had received better
treatment. “With some exceptions, each Plaintiff has only submitted
his or her personal opinion that similarly-situated Caucasian officers
received more favorable treatment,” Scott wrote.
Perhaps Scott’s words were on Cox’s mind
when he made his opening statement on Jan. 22, telling the all-white jury
this case wasn’t just about race. “At the heart of it,
it’s about retaliation,” he said, promising to prove that Davis
and Joy were “attacked for speaking out.”
Assistant corporation counsel Frank Martinez used his
opening statement to emphasize the high ranks both Davis and Joy had
obtained, as well as the steps Harris took to diversify the department. He
also cautioned the jury to remember that this case was not about Frazier. As the trial progressed, this warning was repeated
several times by the judge, who told jurors that any testimony from or
about Frazier — the black rookie cop who resigned from SPD in August
2002 amid a year of erroneous reports that she was being investigated for
failing to “prevent the rape of a fellow officer’s
daughter” — was being presented only as “background for
actions the plaintiffs took” and assignments they were given. The
reminder was necessary because so much of the testimony focused on Frazier.
For anyone who has followed Frazier’s case, the
trial presented some new information, especially from the first witness,
Mary “Mitzi” Vasconcelles. During Frazier’s brief tenure
at SPD, Vasconcelles was assistant chief of internal affairs and therefore
received information about the performance of new SPD recruits being
trained at Illinois State Police academy. Trainers told SPD that Frazier
was “not working to her potential” and that SPD should not hire
her, but Harris declined to remove the lone minority recruit. So
Vasconcelles and Lt. Mark Bridges met with the trainers to investigate the
problem and decided to assign Joy to mentor Frazier during her training
— a move that proved beneficial, Vasconcelles said. Such help was not unusual, Vasconcelles testified.
For example, SPD would ask the ISP to hold off giving a second firearms
test to recruits who had trouble shooting so that they could receive
“intensive training” at SPD’s academy before taking their
second test. As head of IA, Vasconcelles also supervised the
investigation into Frazier’s handling of the 911 call that ultimately
ended both their careers. Around 2 a.m. on Oct. 31, 2001, a girl told dispatch
that several black males were knocking on her apartment door. Frazier
searched the area and asked dispatch to telephone the complainant. Seeing
nothing amiss, and getting no answer on the phone, she left to answer
another call.
Five hours later, the same girl called 911 again.
This time, responding officers found her door ajar, and the girl said she
had been raped. On Jan. 4, 2002, the State
Journal-Register reported that Frazier was
being investigated for failure to prevent the rape of the girl, whose
father was an SPD officer. That account was repeated by radio and
television for almost a year, until an Illinois
Times investigation published Oct. 31,
2002, revealed that the rape had occurred before the girl ever dialed 911. Vasconcelles testified that she tried to persuade
Harris to correct the erroneous media accounts, saying that it was the
department’s moral obligation. Harris, however, told her the
city had no legal obligation to do so.
Vasconcelles also testified that Frazier’s
mentor and friend Lea Joy knew the true sequence of events all along,
saying that Joy — who was then assigned to the IA division —
read the police report while standing in Vasconcelles’ office door. This claim echoes earlier published reports implying
that Joy’s fellow plaintiff Rickey Davis had access to the report.
That allegation first appeared in an SJ-R article published Jan. 13, 2003, and was repeated in
an investigation commissioned by then-Mayor Karen Hasara. Davis vehemently
denied the allegation, and Joy, who never got to take the stand, presumably
would have also denied Vasconcelles’ accusation. During a break in
the trial, Joy was overheard in the hallway muttering under her breath
about Vasconcelles. Vasconcelles’ testimony also contradicted
published reports that Hasara’s decision not to seek re-election had
been made well in advance of the Frazier scandal. Vasconcelles said that,
in the days after the Illinois Times story broke, Hasara called her in and told her she
was being demoted to her civil-service rank, lieutenant. When Vasconcelles
protested that she had only been following orders, the mayor responded that
she was not running for re-election. “I believe it was more her
reputation on the line,” Vasconcelles said. On Nov. 15, 2002, Hasara announced that she would not
run for mayor, telling the SJ-R her decision had nothing to do with the Frazier case:
“I’m not the kind of person who runs from anything; I never
have,” she told the SJ-R. “But if that’s what people choose to think,
so be it.”
Frazier took the stand and testified in a calm, quiet
voice, though she twice appeared to choke up — once while recounting
how Davis tried to stop her landlord from carrying out an eviction while
SPD officers looked on and laughed at her outrage over seeing
Frazier’s family’s belongings dumped into trash bags and
splattered with bleach. “Rickey seemed to want peace. He continued to
ask me to calm down,” she said. When Davis approached the other SPD
officers, they turned their backs — “literally,” Frazier
testified. “It was probably more hurtful for him that it was for me,
so I just backed down.”
The only witness who spent significant time on the
stand and did not focus on Frazier was Rob Williams, whose testimony
ultimately ended the trial. Cox told the judge he called Williams expecting
him to simply repeat testimony he had given in his July 15, 2005,
deposition, much of which appeared in an Illinois
Times cover story [see “Reluctant
witness,” Jan. 19, 2006].
In that deposition, Williams recounted numerous
racial incidents he had experienced during his almost 20 years at SPD, but
also explained that he had purposely forgotten any insults he felt he had
resolved man to man. At trial, Cox several times challenged
Williams’ testimony by asking him to read directly from his
deposition — a technique usually used by an attorney who is trying to
“impeach,” or discredit, a witness. The first time Cox used this strategy with Williams
— quibbling over whether then-chief Harris was “under
siege” in the aftermath of the Frazier scandal — Williams at
first answered, “I don’t know if I would use the word siege,
but, yes, there was an amount of pressure from outside sources.”
When Cox reminded him he had agreed with
“siege” in his deposition, Williams indicated that he had
something to add: “During that deposition — and it’s
not making any excuses — at the time of that deposition, how can I
say this? I felt that you as the attorney for the black officers, as you
had identified yourself, were actually representing me. And there was a lot
of confusion and misrepresentation when I was in there giving that
deposition that apparently came clear after the deposition. Again, I stand
by everything that was said in that deposition, but I would like to say
there was a lot of confusion as far as that deposition.”
The very next question resulted in another quibble
— whether the siege was a result of controversy surrounding Frazier
or “also the officers’ speaking out.” When Williams
answered, “I would say as it relates to Renatta Frazier, yes,”
Cox again referred him to his deposition. At that point, the judge reminded Cox that,
“Generally, one does not impeach one’s own witness.” Cox
then asked for a bench conference and requested that Scott declare Williams
a hostile witness. Assistant corporation counsel Lang told Scott that
Cox still represented Williams, saying, “It’s hard to believe
that he is a hostile witness with his own client,” according to the
transcript. Scott denied the request, but with more quibbling
over whether the environment at SPD was racially hostile or
“extremely racially hostile,” the tension between Cox and
Williams remained palpable. When Lang began his cross-examination of Williams, he
promised to “liven things up here” but instead stunned
courtroom observers by presented a graphic using doughnuts to illustrate
the percentages of black lieutenants and white lieutenants at SPD —
chocolate for African-Americans, glazed for Caucasians. After establishing that the percentage of chocolate
deputy chiefs exceeds the percentage of black residents in Springfield,
Lang began to question Williams about his discussions with other members of
the Black Guardians, asking whether they had pressured Williams. The answer to that question may never be known. After
several hours of discussions outside the presence of the jury — in
which Scott admonished Cox for presenting a witness he hadn’t spoken
to in more than a year and the city attorneys for failure to check whether
Williams had a lawyer — the judge declared a mistrial. Before dismissing the jury, Scott emphasized to
everyone in the courtroom and especially to Williams that he was not to
blame for the mistrial: “I want you to know if anyone suggests to you
that the fact that this case has blown up and ended this way is your fault,
I want you to know that I don’t view it that way.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2007.
