Lawyer for Granton, LaPorta details how city can avoid future massive police misconduct payouts
Description
On this episode of The Daily Line’s Aldercast, attorney Antonio Romanucci, a principal and partner at Romanucci & Blandin, details the police misconduct cases he has brought against the city of Chicago.
Romanucci is representing the family of Maurice Granton Jr., who was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in June. He also represented Michael LaPorta, who won a record-setting judgement in an off-duty shooting by a fellow officer — $44.7 million. He discusses both cases and what it’s like facing off against attorneys representing the city of Chicago.
“They do not agree that there is a code of silence,” Romanucci said of city attorneys in an August interview. “They deny it. They deny that racism exists, they deny anything that the mayor said in December of 2015, when he was trying to fix a city that was on the brink of possibly some of the worst rioting that we’ve seen since the 1960s.”
“When are we going to say that enough is enough and just stop? It is time to pay up and reform and train our officers to be better so we don’t have to pay any more,” Romanucci said. “Could you imagine the trust that you would gain from the community if the police acknowledged, ‘Well, we’ve been wrong. We’ve done this city wrong for many, many years and now we’re going to fix it,’?”
Romanucci also addresses criticism from the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 about lawyers lining their pockets off of police misconduct cases, the uphill battle that prosecutors face in the murder trial of officer Jason Van Dyke, and the need for an early warning system for problem officers.
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