Miscarriage of Justice
The Defender was too kind. The police failed Black Chicagoans during the 1919 race riots, and the prosecutor and the courts failed them in the months that followed.
Unfortunately, the full extent of those failures are hidden from view, because few records of the various riot trials remain. But we do have the trial transcript and appeal record from one riot trial involving Black defendants. And those records paint an ugly picture of perjured testimony, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and judges who stood by and did nothing.
This is the story of that case.