The 23rd floor of the Daley Center courthouse was pitched into confusion Wednesday night by a jury’s response to a legal mechanism little-known to the public — a “special interrogatory,” a specific question posed to jurors.
Capping a closely watched trial, jurors found that Chicago police Officer Robert Rialmo fatally shot 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier without justification and awarded the family just over $1 million. But in answering an interrogatory introduced by the city’s lawyers, jurors held that Rialmo reasonably believed he had to fire to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm. Faced with the contradictory findings, Judge Rena Marie Van Tine ruled for the city and Rialmo, wiping away the verdict and damages.
Jury foreman Dave Fitzsimmons told the Tribune that jurors believed the shooting wasn’t justified and didn’t think their answer to the special interrogatory would negate the verdict.
While jurors did not feel LeGrier’s parents should get a big payday, they did want to send a message, said Fitzsimmons, who indicated the outcome bothered him “a great deal.”
“We wanted to make our point about this shooting not being justified and to get justice for Quintonio LeGrier,” he said Thursday night. “I feel hoodwinked.”
The jury’s determination marked a strange finish to a trial over one of the most divisive incidents in recent Chicago police history. The shooting happened as Rialmo and his partner responded to a domestic disturbance on the West Side in 2015. LeGrier approached officers with a bat and Rialmo fired, hitting the teenager five times and also killing 55-year-old bystander Bettie Jones. The city averted trial with her family by reaching a tentative $16 million settlement earlier this month.
The trial over LeGrier’s death focused on conflicting accounts of whether the teen presented an immediate threat to the officers. After sitting through a week-and-a-half of evidence and testimony — ranging from dramatic re-enactments to numbing recitations of experts’ qualifications — the jury deliberated for about 3 ½ hours before reaching a verdict.
Fitzsimmons said jurors paid attention and took copious notes. There was dissent in the jury room early on, he said, but the panel didn’t take long to unanimously decide that the physical evidence showed that LeGrier was a significant distance from the officer and the shooting wasn’t warranted.
The result threw a spotlight on special interrogatories, a common feature in civil trials, according to veteran lawyers. The questions are supposed to ensure that jurors clearly understand the legal basis of their verdict and that their findings are consistent with the law, attorneys said.
“This is more to make sure that there isn’t confusion about the law, so when (jurors) go through and they check these boxes, it should add up to be on one side or the other,” said attorney Ronald Safer.
Attorney Basileios Foutris, who represents the LeGrier family, said he regards special interrogatories as confusing to jurors. He said he plans to seek to reinstate the $1.05 million verdict.
“No jury on this planet is gonna go against a police officer and award more than a million dollars if they think that it was a perfectly appropriate shoot,” Foutris said.
Rialmo’s lawyer, Joel Brodsky, disagreed and said the judge’s ruling should stand. He pointed to a state law that holds that a special interrogatory trumps a verdict when the two don’t match.
Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the city’s Law Department, confirmed that the special interrogatory was introduced by private lawyers handling the case for the city.
The LeGrier case marked the second time in recent history that a lawsuit over a Chicago police shooting was thrown into uncertainty by a conflicting jury finding. In 2015, a Cook County jury found that an officer shot and killed 19-year-old Niko Husband without justification and awarded $3.5 million in damages. But the jury answered a special interrogatory and said the officer reasonably believed Husband presented an immediate threat of death or great bodily harm.
The judge wiped away the verdict, but the Illinois Appellate Court overturned her decision and reinstated the verdict in February. The decision turned on the fact that the interrogatory did not ask jurors if the use of force was “necessary to prevent” imminent death or great bodily harm. The appeals judges ruled that asking jurors whether the shooting was necessary to avert the threat was “indispensable.”
In the LeGrier case, the special interrogatory included that language and closely resembled the state law on justifiable shootings by police.
McCaffrey said that the city’s lawyers adjusted the language to account for the appellate ruling from the Husband case. McCaffrey confirmed that private attorney Brian Gainer worked for the city on both cases.
Veteran lawyer Terry Ekl said he believed that adjustment in the interrogatory’s language likely means the judge’s ruling will hold up on appeal.
Fitzsimmons said the result felt like “dirty pool.” The jurors understood the question to relate to Rialmo’s perspective but didn’t view their answer as undermining the other parts of the verdict, he said.
Wednesday night’s ruling will not be the final word on the LeGrier shooting, as the Chicago Police Board has yet to rule on whether Rialmo should be fired. The officer, who is on paid desk duty, also remains under investigation for a December 2017 bar fight in which he punched two men in the face in an altercation caught on security video. Brodsky has said Rialmo was defending himself.
dhinkel@chicagotribune.com
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