Emanuel seeks to settle 2 cop misconduct cases for nearly $33 million

Jan 15, 2013 - 0 Comments
January 14, 2013 Chicago Tribune

Christina Eilman, 22, now at home with her parents Rick and Kathy in a suburb of Sacramento, CA., on Tuesday, March 6, 2007. Christina spends most of the time in her bed or on the living room sofa. Eilman, a former UCLA student suffering from a severe bipolar episode, survived a fall from the 7th-floor window of the Robert Taylor Homes after police released her into a high-crime neighborhood on May 8, 2006, in Chicago. (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

Nearly seven years after Christina Eilman wandered out of a South Side police station and into a catastrophe, her tragic entanglement with the Chicago Police Department began to come to an end Monday — with a proposed $22.5 million legal settlement that may be the largest the city ever offered to a single victim of police misconduct.

Though the settlement is a staggering sum on its own, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration has placed a second eight-figure police settlement on Tuesday's City Council Finance Committee agenda. A $10.2 million settlement is proposed for one of the victims of notorious former police Cmdr. Jon Burge, bringing to nearly $33 million the amount aldermen could vote to pay victims of police misconduct in a single day.

The latest Burge settlement would be for Alton Logan, who spent 26 years in prison for a murder he did not commit and who alleged in a federal lawsuit that Burge's team of detectives covered up evidence that would have exonerated him — a departure from previous cases that documented torture used by Burge's team to extract false confessions. The Logan case would bring the tab on Burge cases to nearly $60 million when legal fees are counted. Burge is serving 41/2 years in federal prison for lying about the torture and abuse of suspects.

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