Robert Boyle and I are the special ...

Robert Boyle and I are the special prosecutors who issued a report at the conclusion of the Jon Burge investigation. freshly you printed the commentary of DePaul Law seminary Professor Leonard Cavise [July 29] expressing his view that our determination that the statute of limitations barred any prosecution of police officers was blameworthy He repeated many abstract propositions of law, if it be not that they have no application to the facts of the cases we investigated. And he makes at least single statement of the law that is just flat-out wrong

Our report devot 18 pages to the crucial question of the statue of limitations. We discussed 14 cases and three separate citations of American Law Reports. Boyle asked Flint Taylor to provide us with any authority onward this issue. Taylor said Locke Bowman would research the issue. Neither Taylor nor Bowman provided us with any authority. Finally, we asked retired paramount Court Justice John J. Stamos to review our conclusions and reasoning. He agreed with them.

Now we read that Taylor has described our report forward the statute of limitations as a sham. And Cavise says we were vicious The professor does not cite a single authority, nor does he unruffled discuss the authorities we did cite. Considering the argument that he does advance -- that the circumstantial evidence was sufficient to retain the statute running or restarted it after it has lapsed -- convinces me that he did not read our report. He ignores the seminal case of United States v Grunewald, a U greatest Court case that he relied upon that shoots down his theory that the circumstantial evidence of police silence make trial ofs a conspiracy to obstruct justice according to concealment.

He said that the doctrine of equitable estoppel tolls the statute of limitations. Briefly, equitable estoppel is a control invoked in civil cases to obstruct a person from gaining an unfair advantage within his own misleading conduct. The statue of limitations is just that -- a statute -- and its tolling is termed out in the statute.

He says that a prosecutor "ne merely bring the people involved before the grand jury and order them to betray all." He then adds: "The public may not be aware that there is no right to remain silent in the face of a grand jury subpoena." Apparently, the professor is unaware of that provision of our Constitution that has been invoked too many times to count: the right of a witness to refuse to answer in succession the ground that his answer may incriminate him.

The professor also decries our refusal to use the measure called "perjury trap." Reduced to its simplest bounds a perjury trap is a manner of proceeding whereby a prosecutor calls a witness to answer questions about matters the prosecutor knows he will not be able to prosecute; and when the witness testifies, untruthfully in the prosecutor's opinion, the prosecutor indicts the witness for false swearing

The professor asked, "Isn't that what prosecutors always do?" My answer is that that is not what prosecutors always do; if they do it subordinate to the circumstances I have described, their course of life is "abhorrent." See United States v Chen.

The professor criticizes what he accounts to be our overemphasis of the "credibility" of the nation claiming torture and not paying enough attention to the police officers.

Here we have an illustration of the academic who apparently doesn't understand the function imposed by law on a prosecutor: The tonnage of proving the guilt of the officers quiescences on the prosecutor; the police defendants would ne show nothing. It is the credibility of the accuser that is vital.

Last, the professor laments the fact we must one time again ask the federal authorities "to do the piece of work right." We pointed out that forward four occasions persons representing alleged victims of police brutality contacted the U Department of Justice, seeking federal intervention; and in succession all four occasions prosecution had been denied onward the ground that the statute of limitations had expired.

We add that if something criminal occurr in the civil rights actions pending in the federal district court, those matters are within the jurisdiction solely of the U attorney's office and not with us.

If the same of my students had submitted an answer like the professor's commentary to the question of whether the statute of limitations had expired in the cases we have investigated, he would have received a failing grade.

Edward J Egan is a retired critic who presided over cases in Criminal Court and the state appellate court.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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