For years, people arrested in Chicago have been illegally denied access to phone calls and lawyers. And in the last month, many of the 2,600+ demonstrators who faced arrest for participating in Black Lives Matter protests were also denied access to legal counsel.
This week, NLG Chicago joined a broad coalition of activists and attorneys who are suing the City of Chicago in an effort to stop this practice. Black Lives Matter Chicago, the #LetUsBreathe Collective, STOP Chicago, Ujimaa Medics, GoodKids MadCity, and the Cook County Public Defender’s Office are all co-plaintiffs in the case.
As #LetUsBreathe Collective organizer Damon Williams told the Chicago Tribune after being held for hours without access to an attorney: “This is a system of disappearance, this is a system of torture… Our institution that we pay to so-called protect and serve, which they don’t do, they hunt and capture, that hunting and capturing is not even done within the very basic laws that we have set up.”
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, charges that “The City of Chicago, through its agents at the [Chicago Police Department], maintains both official and de facto policies intended to prevent detainees from accessing legal representation.
These policies include:
- refusing to allow people in CPD custody access to a phone for extended periods of time or at all;
- refusing to inform attorneys where their clients are being held in custody when directly asked for location information;
- refusing to allow attorneys physical access to police stations where their clients are being held;
- conditioning telephone access on a client’s waiver of state law and their constitutional rights;
- and refusing to display the [Public Defender’s] Police Station Representation Unit (PSRU) hotline number in CPD stations so that detainees do not know how to get in touch with an attorney.
The City of Chicago has a long record of condoning incommunicado detention in its police stations. … It has blocked attorneys from accessing clients until after their clients were charged. CPD officers have intimidated detainees from seeking counsel and denied them the use of telephones. And by cutting off access to the outside world, CPD ensures that detainees have no protection from police abuse, including coercive interrogations.”
You can learn more by watching the YouTube video of the press conference held when the case was filed, visiting MacArthur Justice Center’s site on the case, and reading news coverage from WTTW, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Reporter and Block Club.
