Patrol car video shows cops lied in testifying against Joseph Sperling, said judge
CHICAGO – Five Glenview and Chicago veteran police officers who lied in sworn testimony, according to a judge, are themselves facing a federal lawsuit today by a motorist who says they violated his constitutional rights in unlawfully arresting him. Joseph Sperling and his attorney, civil rights lawyer Jon Loevy of Loevy & Loevy Attorneys at Law, spoke this afternoon at a well-attended press conference at the firm’s Near West Side office.
Sperling was the subject of a June 2013 traffic stop a few blocks from his home in Glenview. According to today’s suit, all five of the officers lied about five specific facts of the case after having been sworn to tell the truth. One of the Chicago officers allegedly told the Glenview officers to turn off their dashboard cameras, but one of them failed to do so, thus recording the incident and showing that their later police reports and testimony were false.
“All their testimony [against Sperling] was a lie,” said Cook County Circuit Court Judge Catherine Haberkorn in a March 31 hearing. “So there’s strong evidence it was a conspiracy to lie in this case, for everyone to come up with the same lie. . . Many, many, many, many times they all lied.”
Loevy says all too often police officers lie in drug cases to secure convictions, but are rarely called to account for it. He is the author of a frequently-cited article on false testimony by police, or “testilying” in criminal justice slang, a practice that criminal defense attorneys say “has become so endemic in criminal cases that it has become the norm. The prosecutors know they are lying, the judges know they are lying, and yet the police lie anyway.”
Today’s suit charges that the officers engaged in a “conspiracy” to violate Sperling’s rights, and that “the videotape showed that each of the five Defendant Officers lied in precisely the same ways, proving that the five Defendants and the Assistant State’s Attorney had deliberately and maliciously concocted a false story to provide to the judge.”
Loevy & Loevy is the largest civil rights law firm in the Midwest and has won more multi-million dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the entire country over the past decade. Copies of today’s suit and Jon Loevy’s article on “testilying” are available by emailing andy@loevy.com
