2-year-old narcotic prescription blocks effort to fire Chicago cop

Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson has dropped his effort to fire a police officer with a history of disciplinary problems who tested positive for the narcotic Oxycodone after the officer produced a two-year-old prescription for the drug.

Johnson had filed disciplinary charges with the Chicago Police Board in January, seeking to fire Officer Clay T. Walker. Johnson said then that the officer had tested positive for the narcotic in January 2016 though he didn’t have a prescription for it.

But lawyers for the city dismissed the case two weeks ago after Walker and his attorney James Thompson produced a prescription for the drug issued in November 2013.

“If Officer Walker had produced this prescription during the investigation, charges would not have been filed,” said Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the city law department. “The law department consulted with three separate medical experts who confirmed that the prescription from 2013 was still valid” when Walker tested positive for Oxycodone more than two years later.

Walker couldn’t be reached. His lawyer wouldn’t comment.

Walker had predicted Johnson wouldn’t be able to fire him.

“It’s probably not going to go anywhere, like everything else,” Walker told the Chicago Sun-Times for a story in March. “If they want to fire me, it’s going to cost them a lot of money. And I’m going to win anyway.”

Two months after testing positive for the narcotic painkiller, Walker went on paid disability leave, where he remains, following back surgery.

Johnson moved to fire Walker a month after the Sun-Times asked to review a separate, unresolved disciplinary case filed against the officer 14 years ago by a woman who said he punched her in the face while she was handcuffed in a police station following a traffic stop and poured a can of Mountain Dew on her.

Walker’s long-lingering disciplinary case for punching the woman was among more than 400 unresolved complaints that had lodged against members of the Chicago Police Department between 1989 and 2011, the Sun-Times reported.

The 22-year-old woman sued the city and settled for $50,000.

Walker was given a 15-day suspension — which he has yet to serve. He was on disability leave at the time he was hit with the suspension. When he returned to work, the police department failed to make him serve it, even as he became involved in a string of other disciplinary cases as well, including one for exposing himself at roll call, that resulted in punishments.

Walker, 49, has faced 26 disciplinary cases during his police career.

In the earlier interview, he told the Sun-Times he doesn’t plan to return to active duty. That would mean he would never serve the 15-day suspension.