Former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke left prison on Thursday after serving less than half of his nearly seven-year sentence for killing Black teenager Laquan McDonald, angering community leaders who feel the white officer's punishment didn't fit his crime. Van Dyke was released at 12:15am from the Taylorville Correctional Center in central Illinois, a corrections official said. The conditions of his parole and what Van Dyke plans to do next weren't immediately known, the AP reports.
Van Dyke in 2018 became the first Chicago officer in about a half-century to be convicted of murder for an on-duty killing—after shooting McDonald 16 times—and many Black leaders hoped his conviction for second-degree murder and aggravated battery signaled a new era of police accountability and of the department's treatment of the city's Black residents. But they said the early release for good behavior after he served about three years, four months of his sentence of six years, nine months revictimized McDonald and the Black community. "This is the ultimate illustration that Black lives don't matter as much as other lives," said the Rev. Marshall Hatch, a prominent minister on the city’s West Side. Mayor Lori Lightfoot made a similar point.
"I understand why this continues to feel like a miscarriage of justice, especially when many Black and brown men get sentenced to so much more prison time for having committed far lesser crimes," Lightfoot said Thursday. The NAACP this week asked US Attorney General Merrick Garland to bring federal civil rights charges against Van Dyke. McDonald's grandmother, Tracie Hunter, has asked for the same thing. And although McDonald’s great uncle, the Rev. Marvin Hunter, believes the sentence was woefully inadequate, he said it doesn’t take away from the significance of the case. "Had Jason Van Dyke gotten one day in jail it would have been a victory because he was the first," Hunter said. “Since then, police across the country are getting convicted of murdering Black people."
(More
Laquan McDonald stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
