“Officer Edward Poppish, Chicago Police Department, 11th District, and I’m here to oppose the release of Johnnie Veal.”
■ “Officer Olsen, Chicago Police Department, 10th District, here to oppose the parole of Johnnie Veal.” ■ At the start of Johnnie Veal’s parole hearing in Springfield, the members of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board watched as some 25 police officers stood, one after another, to introduce themselves. In uniforms, service revolvers on their hips, a sea of blue.
“Officer Carlos Santiago, Chicago Police Department, here to oppose the release of Johnnie Veal.”
It was March 2018, just after 9 in the morning. The officers had bused down from Chicago, a three-hour drive. Few of them were alive in 1970 when the two policemen were gunned down at Cabrini-Green. But they’d heard about Sergeant James Severin and Officer Anthony Rizzato from older colleagues, on police message boards, or in news reports about the cop killer’s most recent bid for release. Some had seen the memorial to the two slain men inside the 18th District police station. But the lack of familiarity with the case was also the point of their presence. They were the embodiment of the police creed that a fallen officer is never forgotten. They needed to show the members of the parole board that there was no expiration date on honoring officers killed in the line of duty.
By the sleepy standards of the parole board, the crowd at the public hearing was enormous, and the proceedings had to be moved a few blocks from the board’s cramped offices to the Illinois State Library. Johnnie had secured a pro bono lawyer, a Chicago civil rights and criminal defense attorney named Sara Garber. She was there and introduced herself. As did a professor who taught Johnnie in a class at the prison, and several others who championed his release. But those in opposition to parole dwarfed the supporters. Along with the Chicago police officers, there were two state legislators, officials from the Fraternal Order of Police and the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation, veterans of the Chicago Police Department (“I was a survivor of the day that Johnnie Veal killed Severin and Rizzato”), and one of James Severin’s nieces — now, like Johnnie, in her 60s — who said her family had never missed a parole hearing in 35 years and would continue showing up generation after generation until both Johnnie and his codefendant died in prison.
Parole board members are like a jury without a judge, civilians appointed to decide whether a long prison sentence should or shouldn’t come to an end. The 12 members of the board present that morning were a motley group. Aurthur Mae Perkins, from Peoria, earned her GED at the age of 38, followed quickly by her bachelor’s and master’s, and became one of the longest-tenured principals in the city’s public schools—a street would be named in her honor. Pete Fisher, a former police chief in central Illinois, was one of four people on the board who’d worked in law enforcement. According to a report by the nonprofit media outlet Injustice Watch, Fisher had voted against parole 160 times, and for release only once, and that for a man whose maximum sentence was soon expiring no matter what.
By law, the parole board included roughly the same number of registered Republicans and Democrats, and the board was racially diverse as well. Kenneth Tupy, one of three former prosecutors on the board, had a bushy white goatee and was a member of the Knights of Columbus, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and the Noon Lions Club. Virginia Martinez was from a mostly Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago; in 1975, when she and a friend passed the bar, they became the first two licensed Latina attorneys in Illinois history. Board members came from all over a state that stretches from the Great Lakes nearly to Tennessee. Each time a former high school guidance counselor named Wayne Dunn opened his mouth, his drawl and twang were a lesson on just how much southern Illinois was South. The governor appointed the members to six-year renewable terms, with the state Senate voting to confirm the appointments. In some states, serving
