“This is not pleasant and this is not easy,” said Judge Vincent Gaughan of the Cook County Circuit Court, who announced the sentence. “This is a tragedy for both sides.”
Jurors convicted Van Dyke in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one for each bullet he fired. Prosecutors asked Gaughan to sentence him to at least 18 years in prison. Van Dyke’s lawyers suggested probation.
Just before learning his sentence of 81 months, Van Dyke rose and read a short statement.
“The last thing I ever wanted to do ... was to shoot Laquan McDonald,” said Van Dyke. “People have the right to judge my actions, however no one knows what I was thinking in that critical moment.”
Van Dyke, who is white, and McDonald, who was black and 17, came to personify the decades of tension between Chicago police and the city’s African-American residents.
McDonald’s death Oct. 20, 2014, at first stirred little public outcry and only cursory media coverage. That changed more than a year later when Van Dyke, 40, was charged with murder and when police dash camera video was released showing McDonald, who was carrying a knife, veering away from police before crumpling to the street as the gunshots started.
Protesters marched repeatedly in the weeks that followed, forcing out the Chicago police superintendent, successfully pushing for policy changes and weakening Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose administration had fought to keep the video out of public view.
“It wasn’t the knife in Laquan’s hand that made the defendant kill him that night,” a prosecutor, Jody Gleason, said during closing arguments. “It was his indifference to the value of Laquan’s life.”
Van Dyke testified in his own defense. “I just kept on looking at that knife and I shot at it,” he told jurors.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.