Chicago cop is corrupt, prosecutors claim, but decline to add charges in gun case.
When a Chicago police officer is on trial in a case accusing him of lying about a gun seizure, the jury won’t hear about other problematic gun seizures that could lead to his firing, a judge has ruled.
Officer Daniel Fair, 35, was charged last year with writing a false report and providing false testimony in the arrest of Rodney Westerfield, who was found with two guns during a search in West Pullman in August 2020 .
As part of that case, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office sought to link Fair to a larger “scheme” investigated by the city’s Office of Civilian Police Accountability, which found that Fair and three other tactical officers seized guns without making arrests and then they lied. about where the weapons were coming from.
Despite citing the COPA allegations in court, prosecutors declined to file charges related to those findings.
“After a thorough review, we have concluded that the evidence presented to us was insufficient to meet our burden of proof to approve the criminal charges,” the state’s attorney’s office previously said.
Now, in a June 20 ruling, Cook County Circuit Judge Ursula Walowski denied prosecutors’ request to introduce “other crimes evidence” in the gun case. The judge said those charges bear little resemblance to criminal charges and would likely have an unfair “prejudicial effect” on Fair’s case.
Fair’s lawyer, Tim Grace, said the judge “got it right and followed the law,” calling evidence of any other offenses “irrelevant and extremely prejudicial.”
A spokesman for the state’s attorney had no comment Friday.
Walowski’s ruling marks the second time a Cook County judge has rejected prosecutors’ efforts to bolster arguments in a criminal case, citing what they say is a pattern of misconduct.
In December, prosecutors sought to overturn Westerfield’s conviction, citing “credibility issues involving Officer Fair and the other officers involved in his arrest that came to light after (Westerfield) pleaded guilty.”
Westerfield pleaded guilty in November 2021 to a felony gun charge and was sentenced to a year in prison, with most of the time served at the Cook County Jail.
Judge Michael Kane ruled that separate COPA charges against Fair and the other officers were irrelevant to Westerfield’s case, noting that Westerfield admitted to having two guns.
“I’m not sure what’s going on in COPA and I honestly don’t care,” Kane said, referring to a complaint Westerfield made to the agency. “All I care about is what happens in the courtroom and what I’m given.”
COPA found that officers Fair, Jeffery Morrow, Kevin Taylor and Rupert Collins — all former members of a Calumet District tactical team — engaged in misconduct that was “substantial and irrefutable.”
A report issued by the agency in January detailed four cases between June 2021 and October 2021 in which it said officers lied about the source of guns they took off the street.
In one case, COPA said, Fair and Morrow recovered a gun used in a Kentucky murder, but let the suspect go. The agency said if officers had searched his name in a law enforcement database, they would have learned he had an active warrant for his arrest for the crime.
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