Two Sides See Different Tolliver Trials - trial of Jonathan Tolliver, African American charged with murder of police officer Michael Ceriale

It was an incendiary combination. On one side, white supporters of slain Chicago Police Officer Michael Ceriale. On the other, black supporters and witnesses for Jonathan Tolliver, the African American teenager accused of killing him.

Flashes of derogatory words and looks showed that racial tensions were high during Tolliver's second trial, said some of his supporters. But those on the Ceriale side said race was not an issue.

And outside the courtroom, race was rarely discussed in Chicago's largest newspapers. While community activists claimed Tolliver was being railroaded because of his race, few prominent civil rights leaders stepped into the case. Their critics said those leaders stayed away from the controversial trial for fear of jeopardizing their ties to City Hall. Mayor Richard M. Daley had criticized the outcome of the first trial, which ended in a hung jury.

"When a white cop gets killed, there's mass hysteria and emotional pressure on any judge or jurors to just convict somebody," said Phillip Turner, an African American criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. Tolliver "was convicted before he got into the courtroom. It was a whole racist mess."

"There were two trials, and I didn't hear race come up until he was guilty," said Joey Ceriale, Michael Ceriale's cousin and the family's spokesman. "If they want to call the race card out, well, let's call the race card out. Mike was a white cop who got shot by a black kid. That's not racist. That's a fact. ... There is no racism here."

The case reflects how whites and blacks have long held different views of the criminal justice system, said Adam Green, a professor of history and African American studies at Northwestern University.

"Many black people in this city, especially poor and young black people, fundamentally lack confidence in the police and the court system. That's what they [many police officers and whites] can't see," Green said.

Tolliver's first trial began Jan. 8 and lasted about three weeks. Ceriale's father, Tony, and partner, Chicago Police Officer Joseph M. Ferenzi, gave emotional testimony about the night Ceriale was shot and his final moments. Seven witnesses testified police coerced them to identify Tolliver as the shooter during previous grand jury testimony. After 10 days, the jury decided it could not reach a verdict on the murder charge.

The second trial, in May, was a near-carbon copy of the first, except this time the jury convicted Tolliver. The Chicago Reporter sat in on the 15-day trial.

Mug Shots

The three-year saga began when Ceriale was shot outside a Robert Taylor Homes building at 4101 S. Federal St. on Aug. 15, 1998. It ended when Tolliver was sentenced to 60 years in prison on July 20.

During that time, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times published 328 stories mentioning either Ceriale or Tolliver, a Reporter analysis shows.

The stories came in waves. There were reports immediately after Tolliver was arrested the night of the shooting and during the six days Ceriale was hospitalized before he died. Articles mentioned Tolliver's previous arrests; the most recent came two days before the shooting. Readers also learned that Ceriale, a 26-year-old rookie already considered a rising star, grew up in West Town on Chicago's Northwest Side.

A year later, the Tribune featured Ceriale and Ferenzi in a four-part, front-page series, "Partners In Peril," detailing the two officers' lives. It also questioned whether police rookies were prepared to handle a dangerous plainclothes assignment at the Robert Taylor Homes.

Later, Tolliver's first and second trials brought two more waves of coverage.

Then readers read that Tolliver, who was 16 at the time of the shooting, grew up in Robert Taylor, a predominantly black public housing development troubled by gangs, drugs and violence. Tolliver family members attended both trials and proclaimed his innocence.

The newspapers published several different photographs of Ceriale and Tolliver, including graduation portraits--Ceriale from the police academy and Tolliver from grammar school.

Of the 328 news reports, race was discussed in three articles in the Sun-Times and three in the Tribune. Four focused on Sam W. Shipp, the lone African American who refused to convict Tolliver of murder in the first trial, leading to a mistrial.

The stories quoted other jurors who complained Shipp was sympathetic to Tolliver because they were both black men. One story quoted Shipp saying he mistrusted police because he had once been arrested on charges that were later dropped.

"I don't recall that race became an issue," said Don Hayner, metro editor at the Sun-Times. While the Shipp angle created "a little racial undercurrent," he added, "it's not necessarily something for us to bring up. I think you've got to let those stories play out the way they play out and not force something."

Paul Weingarten, associate managing editor/metro editor at the Tribune, agreed Shipp presented the only element of race. "It didn't have a huge racial overtone to us. I don't think our reporters were hearing that, either."

A count of the 108 photos the papers published shows pictures of Ceriale or his family appeared 37 times, while 12 were of Tolliver or his family. Ceriale was smiling in all of his 26 photos. Nine of Tolliver's 11 portrayals were apparently mug shots.

Victims and their families typically get more coverage than criminal defendants, according to Robert M. Entman, head of the Communications Department at North Carolina State University. And black defendants usually receive less attention and get more unflattering coverage than white defendants, he said.

Entman has co-authored a series of studies of TV news, including a 1996 analysis of reports in Chicago and 35 other cities. He found black criminal suspects were two times more likely than whites to be pictured in mug shots.

On Feb. 9, the day after the first trial ended, the Sun-Times published Tolliver's grammar school graduation picture and ran a story on how the case had affected the Tolliver family.

Typically, few details are given when inner city black youths are arrested, and readers are left to assume "this is an expected outcome," Entman said. "That absence of an explanation reinforces racial stereotypes."

Thick Tension

While the newspapers rarely reported a racial angle, Tolliver family members, defense attorneys, witnesses and investigators said racial tension was thick inside the courtroom during Tolliver's second trial.

"When I walked down that aisle to take the stand, I felt a lot of hatred," said Tolliver's mother, Shewanda Tolliver, who now lives in Gary, Ind., and has two other children.

But Joey Ceriale, of northwest suburban Schaumburg, doesn't believe the tension was about race. "I can only imagine, if you got police officers in there and you got a defendant who is accused of killing a police officer, I assume there's going to be a lot of tension," he said. "How is there not going to be? He killed a cop."

Crystal Easley, a defense witness and Taylor Homes resident, and Ike Williams, an investigator for Tolliver's lawyers, told the Reporter an unidentified white man who sat in court with the Ceriale family called Easley and another witness "jungle bunnies" as they were waiting outside the court to testify on May 21. In a separate incident, Marie Carr, another Taylor resident, said she was also called a "jungle bunny."

Police officers and people sitting with the Ceriale family were "saying that they don't like the blacks over there" at Robert Taylor, said Carr. "They said that we are killers over here and that everybody over here is gangbangers."

Melissa C. Brown, of the law firm Foley & Lardner and one of Tolliver's attorneys, also heard complaints from other witnesses who said they were subjected to derogatory and racially insensitive remarks. "They all had to walk their own personal gauntlet as they left the courtroom," she said.

"If it was a young white kid that killed a black cop, we would still be adamant that his ass go to jail the rest of his life," said Bill Nolan, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Chicago Lodge No. 7. Defense attorneys "always use race as an issue when they have nothing else."

Sometimes the discussion of gangs and the animosity directed at them are proxies for racial animosity, gang experts said.

"It's very difficult ... to separate the gang from the racial business," said Irving Spergel, a professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Spergel is a longtime expert on youth gangs and delinquency.

Prosecutors called a Chicago police gang expert to testify about his knowledge of the Gangster Disciples' history, drug operations and code words. Prosecutors also questioned nearly every witness from Taylor about the gang and its activities.

But not every answer showed gang connections. James P. McKay, the lead prosecutor and chief of the Felony Trial Division of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, characterized witness Calvin Brown's nickname, "Squeezy," as a gang moniker. But Brown's mother, Catherine Smith, later testified an aunt had given him that nickname a week after his birth.

"In society today, race is so salient that, when you have gang members there, it's a code for 'Oh, it's those black kids' or 'those Spanish kids' or whatever," said John Hagedorn, a criminal justice professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"The gang thing becomes so charged ... that the facts don't matter anymore," said Hagedorn, who has written several studies and books on gangs. "The prosecution brings the gang thing up to a jury and they don't have to prove any case."

But John Gorman, press secretary for the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, said prosecutors focused on gangs not to highlight race, but to show the type of intimidation the witnesses faced. "That is preposterous. The defendant was black. The witnesses were mainly black. The only person who was white was the victim." The evidence against Tolliver was "overwheiming," he added.

Staying Away

Beauty Turner, a community activist and resident of the Taylor homes, believed so strongly that race was a driving force that she helped organize a series of protests. She and the Rev. Paul Jakes Jr., pastor of Old St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church at 531 N. Kedzie Ave. on Chicago's West Side, said many of Chicago's black leaders may not have joined because of politics.

At least seven protests were held in support of Tolliver, either outside the court or in the Robert Taylor housing complex. The turnout varied from about 10 to 100 protesters. But Turner said nearly a dozen ministers from the Taylor area did not respond to her requests for assistance.

Jakes said Shewanda Tolliver asked him for assistance after the first trial. "We got involved because of the overwhelming problem of young African Americans that have been falsely accused of crimes and are being harvested off the streets and into penal institutions," said Jakes.

Shewanda Tolliver said she sought help from other leaders in the week after her son's arrest because "the first 48 hours were crucial." She said she called the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition "two or three times" and the Chicago Urban League once.

She said a receptionist at Rainbow/PUSH advised her to contact her church. The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, did not respond to questions regarding the Tolliver case.

Tolliver said she couldn't remember the name of the Urban League official who gave her the phone number of an attorney.

"Nothing officially came to my office. I didn't receive a request either internally or externally," said James W. Compton, the league's chief executive officer. He added that he believed race was an issue in the case. The league's mission is to combat race-based discrimination, he said, but the organization did not provide Tolliver assistance. "They needed legal experts."

"If I could have had somebody to stand with me then, I think the outcome would have been different," Shewanda Tolliver told the Reporter.

"Every civil rights activist, every politician of color should have been out there," said Beauty Turner.

Former Illinois Appellate Court Justice R. Eugene Pincham noted there are always questions about the treatment blacks receive at the criminal courthouse. For that reason, he wasn't sure if the Tolliver case merited outcry from the black community. "If black folks did that, we would be at 26th and California every day. Our time would be consumed in protesting."

Contributing: Carlos Hernandez Gomez, Micah Holmquist, Ellyn M Ong and Stephanie Williams. Joyce C. Armour, Anita Bryant, Tim Bush, LaSonya Hill, Vince Kong, Eric W. Luchman, Kim Naya, Brian J. Rogal and Rupa Shenoy helped research this article.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Community Renewal Society
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group