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| NewsWednesday, October 24, 2007 4:08 PM CDT |
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Jury awards $2 million to man Chicago police allegedly framed
CHICAGO -- A federal court jury awarded more than $2 million Tuesday to an iron worker who claims two Chicago detectives framed him six years ago on charges of attempting to abduct a pair of preteen girls. “I’d like to let them know that they ruined my whole life and now hopefully I can get it back,” Timothy Finwall, 40, said as he left court the winner in the latest of a series of cases to hand police a black eye. The jury deliberated for five hours over a little more than four days of testimony before awarding Finwall nearly $2.03 million in damages. He was arrested in April 2001 and accused of proposing a “field trip” to an 8-year-old girl and grabbing the arm of another child and offering her candy. A jury acquitted him of the charges in July 2002. Finwall’s attorney, Mike Kanovitz, said the detectives may have been motivated by an earlier brush with the law in which Finwall, a former Marine and Persian Gulf War veteran, disarmed an off-duty police officer. The off-duty officer was drunk and menacing Finwall’s friend at the time, Kanovitz said. He portrayed his client as a hero for taking the officer’s weapon. But Finwall was charged with a crime and got probation. Kanovitz suggested that the earlier incident may have prompted the two detectives to blame Finwall for attempt-ing to abduct the two girls. “Hopefully, someone from the Chicago police department will read the transcript of this trial and they will see the lies these two officers told,” Kanovitz said. He said that “the whole case was a pack of lies.” He pointed to notes one of the officers had allegedly taken on a statement given by one of the girls, noting that the writing was “in perfect paragraph form.” “His testimony was that he took it down just as she told it to him,” Kanovitz said. “He had to sit there for 30 min-utes defending to a jury of eight people just how it is that a 9-year-old girl goes about speaking in perfect paragraph form.” Kanovitz said police prompted witnesses in their testimony, including the mother of one girl. A spokeswoman for the Chicago corporation counsel’s office, Jennifer Hoyle, said that the city was “very disap-pointed in the verdict.” “Witnesses testified at both the criminal trial and this civil trial that Finwall was the one responsible,” Hoyle said. “To this day, (the mother of one girl) maintains that Finwall was the one who tried to abduct her daughter.” The Chicago Police Department has been beset by an array of nasty public relations setbacks in recent weeks. Seven members of a now disbanded elite unit, the special operations division, face charges that they beat and shook down civilians. One member of the unit, which was formed to crack down on drug-dealing street gangs, is charged with plotting the murder of a fellow officer to prevent him from becoming a prosecution witness. Videotapes introduced in two other court cases show police apparently beating a group of businessmen in one bar-room altercation and a husky off-duty officer beating a 115-pound female bartender in another instance. E-mail this story | Print this story | Search archives | RSS Show comments |  Hide comments | Hide comments on all stories |
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