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FOX 32 NEWS - An online petition with more than 15 thousand signatures is seeking to have two Chicago Police officers fired for sexually assaulting a man 12 years ago.
Coprez Coffie sued the officers accusing them of sodomizing him with a screwdriver after a traffic stop on the West Side in 2004. The officers mistook Coffie for a child abuser.
When the case went to trial in 2007, the city settled with Coffie at the 11th hour during jury deliberations for four million dollars.
After the trial ended, Coffie’s attorney Jon Loevy said it was a case of street justice.
“They might have made a mistake and assumed that he was that person and decided to take justice in their own hands, and of course that’s why we are a country of laws, we don’t allow police officers to do street justice in an alley,” Loevy said.
At the time, Coffie said justice was served.
“It was real hard, real hard to talk about what happened to me, but I had to let everybody know what happened,” Coffie said.
The two officers, Scott Korhonen and Gerald Lodwich, remain on the force because the Office Of Professional Standards, the agency that investigated police misconduct at the time, determined the allegations were unfounded. That conclusion was made despite the medical evidence of Coffie's internal injuries, and the fact that the officers were found to have screwdrivers in their glove box.
Now an online petition, prompted by an article in the New York Daily news about the officers still being on the streets, seeks to have them fired.
An online search found that Korhonen has had eight misconduct complaints against him and Lodwich nine, but neither has ever been disciplined.
The Police Department said without any new formal complaint, the Superintendent has no grounds to take the officers off the street.
The Independent Police Review Authority, which replaced OPS, has subpoenaed the court records from the city Department of Law and will review the evidence. That could lead to a new investigation.
The president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Dean Angelo, Sr., said because of that it would be inappropriate to comment on the case at this time.