Daily Herald subpoenaed in Laquan McDonald murder case

Attorneys representing Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke subpoenaed the Daily Herald and two other Chicago-area papers on Jan. 29, 2018, ordering the papers to produce copies of all stories about Van Dyke’s fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2014.

Van Dyke has been charged with murder in connection with the fatal 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager. His trial is scheduled to begin later this year.

Anne Kavanagh, the media spokesperson for Van Dyke’s attorney Daniel Herbert, said that Van Dyke’s defense team subpoenaed three newspapers — the Daily Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times — to support a motion for a change of venue. Kavanagh declined to comment further, citing a gag order issued by Judge Gaughan.

Van Dyke’s legal team apparently plans to argue that extensive coverage of the Laquan McDonald shooting in Chicago-area newspapers has rendered a fair trial for Van Dyke impossible. Van Dyke’s attorneys plan to petition the court to move the trial out of Cook County, Illinois. The Daily Herald is based in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago that is part of Cook County.

The Daily Herald told the Freedom of the Press Foundation that it was served a subpoena on Feb. 7, 2018. The Chicago Sun-Times declined to comment on the subpoena, and the Tribune said that it was served a subpoena on Feb. 5 and planned to contest it.

A copy of the subpoena to the Tribune, obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, orders the paper to bring “any and all articles and/or publications in the electronic archive containing the name ‘Laquan McDonald’ and/or ‘Jason Van Dyke’” to a hearing before Judge Vincent Gaughan on Feb. 1 at 9 a.m.

The articles that Van Dyke’s attorneys are interested in are already publicly available, and it is unclear why they subpoenaed Daily Herald, the Tribune, and the Sun-Times for the articles instead of just searching through the newspapers' archives themselves.

This are not the first media subpoena in the Van Dyke case. In 2017, Van Dyke's attorneys tried to subpoena Jamie Kalven, an independent journalist who reported extensively on the Laquan McDonald murder and the Chicago police department's alleged attempts to cover it up. Judge Gaughan quashed that subpoena.