Is it time for Anita Alvarez to resign?

Did she just go along?

Anita Looking Bad

The person who comes off looking the worst in the entire Koschman affair seems to be recently re-elected Cook County States Attorney Alvarez. The Sun Times investigation is damning:

• The indictment marks a stunning swing in a case that current and former police officials and prosecutors had insisted didn’t merit criminal prosecution.
  
  “There’s no basis for criminal charges,” then-police Supt. Phil Cline said in May 2004.
  
  But, facing new questions about the case, the police reinvestigated last year, again declining to seek charges. They said Vanecko — who never spoke with investigators — acted in self-defense.
  
  “Absent evidence that would enable us to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, there is not a good-faith basis to bring charges,” Sally Daly, Alvarez’s press secretary, said last year
  
  The judge didn’t buy it.
  
  “The system has failed” Koschman, Toomin said in April when he granted the request by Nanci Koschman for a special prosecutor.
  
  The judge ripped “the fiction of self-defense” that he said was “conjured up by police and prosecutors,” and he questioned why Vanecko wasn’t charged.

And this:

• Acknowledging those discrepancies and under fire for not being able to find any files on the Koschman case from her office’s involvement in 2004, Alvarez asked the Illinois State Police to investigate the police department’s handling of the case. “I think there should be an independent police investigation,” Alvarez said.
  
  At first, the state agency agreed. Then, it got a new boss: Alvarez’s chief deputy, Hiram Grau, who had been a deputy superintendent with Chicago Police Department at the time of Koschman’s death, in charge of the department’s detectives. And the state police quickly reversed course and declined to get involved.

Imagine that - Grau shitcanning the State Police investigation after he was working for Anita and before that, in charge of the Chicago D-Unit. Hmmmm.

• The petition went on to say: “Despite . . . witness statements, the 2004 Chicago police investigation was closed without charges in part because the police claimed to be unable to determine the identity of the person who had thown the fatal punch. Such a blatant failure to connect the dots has the hallmarks of an investigation governed by politics, not professionalism.”
  
  And it singled out Alvarez — who now was arguing that she should oversee any new investigation, even though she had declined to step in earlier — for criticism: “Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding the Koschman investigation, Alvarez has publicly defended the work of the Chicago police and the Cook County state’s attorney’s felony review unit, insisting to Sun-Times reporters that there was insufficient evidence to charge Vanecko.

So after calling for a State Police investigation, then her former deputy scotches the whole thing, she then demands to oversee the investigation? What manner of bi-polar office is Anita running? Judge Toomin fires a final broadside:

• “Upon being apprised that Koschman met his death at the hand of an identifiable and known assailant, one might reasonably anticipate that law enforcement officials would bring the offender before the bar of justice.”
  
  Instead, though, Toomin said Alvarez "seems consumed with finding legal justification for Vanecko’s use of deadly force."

That would be the job of the defense attorney, something Vanecko never had to provide for since Anita was running interference for him from her office.

Reprinted from Second City Cop