What in the hell were the cops thinking? It looks to me like they must have thought what they were doing was funny.
WOMAN CAN SUE POLICE FOR RELEASING HER IN NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE SHE WAS ATTACKED, COURT SAYS
By David Heinzmann
Chicago Tribune
April 26, 2012
CHICAGO - More than two years after getting the case, a federal appeals court Thursday ruled that a mentally ill California woman can sue the Chicago Police Department for releasing her into a violent neighborhood where she was raped and nearly killed.
In its decision, the three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the city’s attempt to stop the case and said the only way to sort out whether officers violated Christina Eilman’s rights is to have a trial.
The appellate court took an usually long time to decide the appeal from city of Chicago lawyers, which was filed in February 2010. Eilman’s attorney had filed three motions over the last two years asking the appellate court to hurry up, and recently he asked the federal trial judge to move forward with another part of the case not on appeal.
The judge was still weighing whether to take the unusual step of splitting the case in two when the appellate ruling came down Thursday. The judge had indicated that if she did move forward, the case would go to trial by October.
In the appellate ruling, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote that police knew Eilman was suffering a bipolar breakdown and that responsibility for the sexual assault and injuries she suffered after police released her into a high-crime neighborhood the night of May 8, 2006 has to be decided in a trial.
The city’s appeal had asked the court to dismiss the case against 10 police officers accused of negligence, arguing the police had no responsibility to take care of Eilman, a 21-year-old former University of California, Los Angeles, student who had been arrested after creating a disturbance at Midway Airport.
The appellate ruling left most of the police defendants in the case, but the judges excused two officers whose role in the case didn’t involve responsibility for making decisions about whether Eilman needed care. Decisions about the status of two other officers were sent back to U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Kendall to evaluate.
In reciting the narrative of what happened that night, Easterbrook suggested the police showed little regard for the danger they were putting Eilman in when they released her.
"She was lost, unable to appreciate her danger, and dressed in a manner to attract attention," Easterbrook wrote. He added, "she is white and well off while the local population is predominantly black and not affluent, causing her to stand out as a person unfamiliar with the environment and thus a potential target for crime."
Eilman, who was thrown or fell from the seventh floor of a public housing building after being assaulted, requires around-the-clock care at her parents’ home in California and is dependent on state welfare because she has no health insurance.
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