Suit Settled. Joliet Cops Beat & Dragged Black Man Out of Car & Called him NGHR. Although a Drug Field Test was Negative, White Cops & Technician Lied About it To Detained Him for 48 Days

According to Patch Illinois, The city of Joliet has reached a $450,000 settlement with an Arlington Heights law firm that sued the Joliet Police Department in federal court accusing two city officers of unjustly arresting Joliet resident Elijah Manuel in 2011, Joliet Patch has learned.

In 2011, Manuel spent nearly two months inside the Will County Jail awaiting trial on erroneous drug charges before the Will County State's Attorney's Office dismissed the case, the lawsuit stated.

Besides the city of Joliet, Officers Terrence Gruber and Tom Conroy were named as defendants.

Back in March 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a pretrial ruling favorable to Manuel and his attorneys after hearing arguments on the city of Joliet case in October 2016.

Joliet Patch recently uncovered the $450,000 payout as a result of the Freedom of Information Act request to the city of Joliet. 

According to the Supreme Court order:

“Shortly after midnight on March 18, 2011, Manuel was riding through Joliet, Illinois, in the passenger seat of a Dodge Charger, with his brother at the wheel. A pair of Joliet police officers pulled the car over when the driver failed to signal a turn. According to the complaint in this case, one of the officers dragged Manuel from the car, called him a racial slur, and kicked and punched him as he lay on the ground. The policeman then searched Manuel and found a vitamin bottle containing pills.Suspecting that the pills were actually illegal drugs, the officers conducted a field test of the bottle’s contents. The test came back negative for any controlled substance, leaving the officers with no evidence that Manuel had committed a crime. Still, the officers arrested Manuel and took him to the Joliet police station.

There, an evidence technician tested the pills once again, and got the same (negative) result. See ibid. But the technician lied in his report, claiming that one of the pills was “found to be . . . positive for the probable presence of ecstasy.” Id., at 92. Similarly, one of the arresting officers wrote in his report that “[f]rom [his] training and experience, [he] knew the pills to be ecstasy.” Id., at 91. On the basis of those statements, another officer swore out a criminal complaint against Manuel, charging him with unlawful possession of a controlled substance.

Manuel was brought before a county court judge later that day for a determination of whether there was probable cause for the charge, as necessary for further detention. See Gerstein, 420 U. S., at 114 (requiring a judicial finding of probable cause following a warrantless arrest to impose any significant pretrial restraint on liberty); Ill. Comp. Stat., ch. 725, §5/109–1 (West 2010) (implementing that constitutional rule). The judge relied exclusively on the criminal complaint—which in turn relied exclusively on the police department’s fabrications—to support a finding of probable cause. Based on that determination, he sent Manuel to the county jail to await trial. In the somewhat obscure legal lingo of this case, Manuel’s subsequent detention was thus pursuant to “legal process”— because it followed from, and was authorized by, the judge’s probable-cause determination.

While Manuel sat in jail, the Illinois police laboratory reexamined the seized pills, and on April 1, it issued a report concluding (just as the prior two tests had) that they contained no controlled substances. See App. 51. But for unknown reasons, the prosecution—and, critically for this case, Manuel’s detention—continued for more than another month. Only on May 4 did an Assistant State’s Attorney seek dismissal of the drug charge. See id., at 48, 101. The County Court immediately granted the request, and Manuel was released the next day. In all, he had spent 48 days in pretrial detention.”