The Man Who Fought Chicago for His Cadillac—and Never Got It Back
I first met Spencer Byrd in a Chicago diner one afternoon in 2018. Sitting across from me, he told me an outrageous story about how he’d been battling the city government for two years to get his 1996 Cadillac DeVille out of impound.
Byrd’s story would help lead to reforms to Chicago’s impound program and an ongoing federal class action lawsuit against the city. But despite fighting in court for nearly a decade, he never got his Cadillac back. I learned this week that Byrd died in February, while that lawsuit was still pending.
I’ve often considered it something—if not fate, then at least fortuitous—that Byrd and I connected.
In 2017, a staffer at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois told me about Chicago’s punitive vehicle impound program and put me in touch with a local attorney doing pro bono work with people whose cars had been seized. The attorney gave me the phone numbers of five or six clients who he thought would be interested in talking to me.
Byrd was the only one who responded, and the story he told me was a doozy: He was a carpenter and a part-time auto mechanic in Harvey, Illinois. He said he was giving a client a lift in his car one evening in June 2016, when he was pulled over by Chicago police and searched. Byrd was clean, but his passenger, a man he says he’d never met before, had heroin in his pocket.
The police released Byrd without charging him with a crime, but his car was seized and dually claimed by both the Cook County State Attorney’s Office and the city of Chicago. Essentially, his car was being claimed by two distinct layers of government. Even after a state judge declared Byr
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