January 18, 2019

Chicago Cop Convicted of Murdering Black Teen Gets Nearly Seven Years in Prison

The relatively short sentence ends a yearslong legal battle.

Former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke attends his sentencing hearing in Chicago for the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald.Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/AP/Pool

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Jason Van Dyke, the white former Chicago police officer who was convicted of second-degree murder in October for killing black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, has been sentenced to 81 months, or nearly seven years, in prison. The decision Friday concludes a yearslong legal battle, which included a separate trial for three officers who were alleged to have conspired to cover up the shooting. (The officers were acquitted Thursday.) Van Dyke was sentenced on the second-degree murder charge, which carried a lesser sentence than the aggravated battery with a firearm charges he was also facing. With good behavior, Van Dyke could be out in a little over three years from now.

Although the sentence is relatively short, it’s still notable. Since the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in 2014 and the subsequent national outrage over police killings of black people, very few cops involved in such shootings have been convicted, much less sentenced to substantial prison time. Notable exceptions are Michael Slager, the Charleston, South Carolina, cop who shot and killed Walter Scott in 2015 after a traffic stop, and Roy Oliver, the Dallas officer who killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards when firing into a car full of teens in 2017. Slager and Oliver were convicted of civil rights violations and murder, respectively, and the former was sentenced to 20 years in prison while the latter got 15 years. According to a New York Times analysis of 15 high-profile police shootings that occurred between 2014 and 2016, only three resulted in convictions. Only one (Slager) ended in prison time. 

In addition to second-degree murder, in October jurors also convicted Van Dyke on 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one count for every shot Van Dyke fired. Before Friday’s hearing, Van Dyke was facing anywhere between probation and more than 96 years behind bars. During the sentencing hearing, the prosecution called black men who allegedly were mistreated in the past by Van Dyke while he was on duty.

Police video footage released long after the shooting, which some observers had described as an “execution,” sparked widespread protests and calls for Mayor Rahm Emanuel to step down. (The embattled mayor announced in September that he wouldn’t seek a third term.) As my former colleague Brandon Patterson, who covered the case extensively, reported last year:

Van Dyke shot and killed McDonald on Chicago’s West Side in October 2014 while responding to a call about a teen breaking into cars. But city officials waited more than a year to release police dash-cam footage of the shooting—and did so only after a judge ruled in favor of an independent journalist whose public records requests were repeatedly denied. The video quickly went viral. It showed that Van Dyke fired 16 shots at McDonald—including several while the teen lay wounded on the ground. The footage contradicted the officer’s earlier claim that he’d shot McDonald, who was holding a knife, after the teen lunged at him. (Warning: This footage is disturbing and graphic.)

Following the judge’s decision, Chicago activists and others reacted to the sentence: 

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate