Defying the odds, the mayor has so far avoided the hot seat set out for him by U.S. magistrate judge Geraldine Soat Brown. Last February Brown ordered Mayor Daley to submit to questioning in a civil suit brought by a former death row inmate who says he was tortured and framed by Chicago police detectives. Daley’s resistance has kept the meter running on litigation that’s cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees, though it’s a battle the city has no moral reason to contest and slim hope of winning.
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(1) they wouldn’t name Daley as a defendant “in a civil rights, obstruction of justice, and racketeering conspiracy . . . and they would not seek a finding of liability and damages from Daley for his alleged conspiratorial actions while serving as Cook County State’s Attorney”;
(3) they wouldn’t criticize Daley in any public statements made in connection with the settlement;
If it had made the papers, this order would have come as welcome news to city taxpayers. At the moment, four private firms are engaged by the Law Department to represent the city, various police officials, and Burge and his detectives in five Area Two torture cases now in federal court. Responding to a FOIA request from the Reader in March, the Law Department revealed that the four firms and a fifth no longer employed by the city have been paid more than $7 million since 2003 for their work on these five cases (two of which were not involved in the settlement discussions).
Nine days after the showdown in Aspen’s courtroom came Magistrate Brown’s order that Daley could be deposed. The city appealed Brown’s order to Aspen but it also did what Brown told it to and scheduled the deposition for June 1.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers have been busy too, making a case that the city proposed a settlement and then double-crossed them. In the April 5 filing they argued, “The unrebutted conduct of the City, in leading the Plaintiffs’ down a primrose path, agreeing to settle on the eve of the November, 2006 elections, buying the Plaintiffs’ silence and inaction on issues which appeared to be significant to the February, 2007 mayoral election, then refusing to sign the papers during that entire period, first without explanation, then by asserting a mystery ‘issue’ which it would not even reveal to Plaintiffs’ counsel, makes out a powerful case of fraudulent bad faith by the City.”
