This is the true story of a police officer in Chicago, Illinois, who was involved in an ugly case of police brutality, wrongful arrest, wrongful conviction, and a miscarriage of justice that saw an obviously guilty cop walk free without even a misdemeanor charge.
Officer Howard Morgan, a Chicago police detective assigned to a commuter rail line, where he had done his job for 13 years, was with four other Chicago policemen involved in an incident in February, 2005, with a Black suspect whom the police accused of firing his gun at them. This was an excuse for the cops to shoot him 28 times. The truth is the suspect never fired a shot, not one. Somehow, he survived this shooting. But then, he was arrested, imprisoned, put on trial, and convicted of a crime that in truth he did not commit, which is the typical process for a Black suspect.
Being the police critic that I am, and one of the less forgiving ones, I have a certain viewpoint on this issue. Can you guess what it is? Go on to read the rest of it to find out.
The suspect was Howard Morgan himself. He is Black. The other policemen involved are all White. They shot Morgan 28 times, yet none of them were charged with attempted murder. Morgan did not fire a single bullet, yet he was charged with attempted murder.
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Howard Morgan is innocent. He never did what his aggressors lied about. Those cops simply wanted to find a Black man for their sport, which is what cops do so often to Chicago residents. Those same cops reacted a certain way upon finding out their target was a police detective in their own police department. Their reaction was to make more outrageous lies and pursue the harshest prosecution. Who knows how many civilian Blacks have been shot for sport, and who knows what was done with the survivors.
After ten years in prison and a sentence that amounted to the rest of his life in prison, Howard Morgan became a free man on January 28, 2015. His sentence was commuted when he was given clemency by Illinois governor Pat Quinn. He still has a permanent police record of his wrongful conviction. A petition for clemency had been submitted to the governor. I am one of the signers of that petition. I will not be satisfied until he is exonerated and his record cleared.