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Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office is seeking to settle two notorious cases of alleged police misconduct for more than $30 million, according to an agenda prepared for City Council consideration this week.
The city is prepared to pay $22.5 million to the family of a severely injured California woman who alleged in a six-year-old lawsuit that negligence by the Chicago Police Department led to officers abandoning her in a high-crime neighborhood where she was raped and plummeted from a seventh-floor window. Her lawsuit is scheduled for trial in federal court next week.
The proposed settlement is noted on the agenda for Tuesday’s City Council Finance Committee meeting.
The agenda also includes discussion of a proposed $10.25 million settlement in an unrelated lawsuit involving claims against infamous former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. A federal civil trial in that case was postponed in December; the lawsuit alleges that Burge and other detectives covered up evidence decades ago that would have exonerated a man who spent 26 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
The city has already paid out millions of dollars in other lawsuits alleging Burge and his colleagues repeatedly tortured confessions out of innocent men. But the case involving Christina Eilman of California could go down as one of the single most expensive police abuse cases in city history.
A settlement in the lawsuit brought by the family of Eilman would avert a trial that was to begin next week. It would air evidence that police ignored the then-21-year-old woman’s mental illness when they arrested her at Midway Airport in 2006. Instead of seeking mental health care for her, Eilman was locked up overnight in a cell several miles from the airport and then released at dusk the next day, still in the midst of a bipolar breakdown and with no idea where she was. She was soon abducted and sexually assaulted before plummeting from a window in the last standing building of the infamous Robert Taylor Homes.
Eilman survived but suffered a severe brain injury, shattered pelvis and numerous other injuries that have left her permanently disabled. In their lawsuit, the family sought as much as $100 million for her.
City prepared to pay $33 million in two cop misconduct cases
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City prepared to pay $33 million in two cop misconduct cases
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City prepared to pay $33 million in two cop misconduct cases
