Injured Man Gets Jury Award, But Wants Cops Fired

We first told you about this story in 2007: A Chicago man alleges Chicago police beat him so severely he needed surgery to repair a fracture in his skull.

CBS2Chicago

But even though a jury recently awarded Curtis Mason Jr. hundreds of thousands of dollars, he says it means nothing to him, because of one thing: "I really feel that the policemen should have been fired."

"The police officers had to justify why they would be allowed to use the type of force it would take to fracture a man's skull," said Mike Kanovitz, the plaintiff's attorney. "And they invented a story of Curtis behaving irrationally, threatening them, trying to assault them, and the jury saw right through it."

Mason Jr. was awarded $625,000 in compensatory damages. He says he'd give all that money back if the officers he says did this to him were taken off the streets right now.
"It was a very devastating feeling," he said. "I think the message that the city is portraying to us is that policemen can do whatever they want, to an individual, and still have their job."

"The reason why he was pulled over is because he's African American and I'm white, and there's some people in this country who don't like that," Johnson said in September 2007.
"The officer told him, put your (expletive) hands behind your back," she said. "Curtis went to put his hands behind his back when the male officer … struck him."
During the beating, Mason Jr. says he was kicked in the eye, creating an orbital fracture. He needed a two-hour operation to fix a quarter-size hole under his left eye.
The Chicago Police Department did not discipline the officers. In response to this story, the spokesperson for the city's law department says: "The plaintiff wouldn't cooperate with the Independent Police Review Authority. IPRA will now re-examine the incident and determine if any discipline should happen."

I think this might be enough for today. A black man, beaten to the point of a fractured skull, with no valid reason or explanation. The victim's white fiancée at the time, thinking it was racially motivated.

The cops, fabricating stories to cover their crap, and THIS time, the jury didn't buy it. The City pays out a lot of dough to the victim, but what happens to the cops? Nothing.

They should have been held criminally responsible for their actions. Instead, they continue to patrol the wonderful streets of Chicago.