Cook County Anita Alvarez Under Attack For Bizarre Claim In CBS Interview

I have previously written how Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez has lead a national effort to jail citizens who film police in public — a major deterrent to the use of the single most important technology in fighting police abuse. She was previously criticized by the Seventh Circuit for her “extreme” arguments to strip citizens of their first amendment rights. Now Alvarez has added to her rather notorious reputation with a bizarre claim as part of a 60 minutes piece on a litany of wrongful convictions by her office. She suggests that the fact that a serial rapist’s DNA was found on the body was not proof of the innocence of five teens because he might have come across the girl’s dead body later and had sex with it.

The case involves Cataresa Matthews, 14, who was raped and murdered in 1991. Five teens were convicted and became known as the Dixmoor Five. In 2011, they were exonerated when DNA linked a serial rapist to the crime. Alvarez appears in the clip as suggesting that the teens could still be guilty and that the serial rapist raped the corpse later.

Alvarez claims that the segment, “Chicago: The False Confession Capital,” gave a distorted view of her interview and that her statement was taken out of context. She insisted that she was only saying that we do not know, with certainty, what happened at the crime scene.

You can judge for yourself in the interview below. She seems quite clear and ridiculous. There was no DNA evidence of any of the boys at the scene or on the victim.

The question is how long will it take for Chicago to remove Alvarez from office. Between these cases and her campaign against free speech in the filming of police officers, Alvarez is becoming a public menace — at least to constitutional rights and due process.

Source: ABA Journal