Vol. 79/No. 20      June 1, 2015

In November 2013 Servin was stripped of his police powers and charged with involuntary manslaughter, reckless discharge of a firearm and reckless conduct.

He is only the second Chicago cop to be charged with a crime for shooting someone in the last 17 years.

“The judge’s decision was outrageous,” said Boyd’s mother Angela Helton on the steps of Leighton courthouse after the verdict. “Servin gets to go home and be with his family and I’ll never see my daughter again.”

“We didn’t expect anything else,” Pat Jordan, Boyd’s cousin, told the Militant. “If you’re a white cop most of the time you can get away with killing Black people. But if it was reversed and I killed a cop I’d be charged with first-degree murder.”

Servin, who was off duty, was in his car when he got into a verbal altercation with a group of youth near his home. One of the men allegedly walked toward Servin’s vehicle holding a cellphone. Servin pulled his gun, stuck it out of the driver’s side window across his body and fired five shots.

One shot struck Antonio Cross, who was holding the cellphone. Another struck Boyd in the back of the head. She died the next day.

The trial began April 9. After the prosecution rested its case following three days of testimony, Servin’s attorneys moved for a directed verdict.

Before a packed courtroom April 20 — more than 50 relatives of Boyd and supporters of her family on one side and roughly the same number of cops and others supporting Servin on the other — Porter said Servin’s act was deliberate, not reckless. Because of that, the judge said, he couldn’t convict him of involuntary manslaughter. He said he also couldn’t convict him of a more severe crime such as first- or second-degree murder, implying that the Cook County State’s Attorney had filed the wrong charges against the killer cop. Therefore, he said, he was dismissing the charges.

Porter’s ruling sparked a spontaneous outburst in the courtroom and among those gathered on the courthouse steps. Speaker after speaker denounced the ruling. That evening a handful of demonstrators marched peacefully through the neighborhood where Boyd was shot. The following day close to 100 rallied to denounce the verdict at Daley Plaza.

The ruling means that “when a person is very, very bad, they can’t be found guilty of being merely bad,” Leonard Cavisse, a former DePaul University law professor, wrote in the Chicago Sun Times. “That’s a miscarriage of justice.”

“Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez told us the officer was going to be charged with second-degree murder, then the day he was charged it was switched, without consulting us, to involuntary manslaughter,” Martinez Sutton, Boyd’s brother, told the Militant. “Now the judge and the State’s Attorney are pointing fingers at each other. Meanwhile, another killer cop got off.”

Alyson Kennedy contributed to this article.
 
 
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