CHICAGO — Three Chicago police officers were acquitted on Thursday of charges that they covered up for a fellow police officer after he shot and killed Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, a verdict that came as a blow to those who saw the case as a rare moment when officers might be held accountable for a longstanding pattern of defending one another.

Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson, reading her verdict to a Cook County courtroom packed with spectators, dismissed prosecutors’ assertions that the officers had conspired and obstructed justice.

“This court finds that the state has failed to meet its burden on all charges,” Judge Stephenson said.

Along with the three officers, the broad concept of a police “code of silence” was on trial in Chicago, a city where police have been accused for decades of covering up fellow officers’ misconduct.

As in other cities, residents long have complained that police officers stuck together when it came to accounting for their actions, and the issue has bubbled up in cases involving a drunk-driving officer, an off-duty officer’s beating of a bartender and a lawsuit by two police officers who said they faced retaliation after breaking the code. Even the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has acknowledged a “code of silence.”

[Read More: Was the Laquan McDonald case a turning point or an aberration?]

In a speech in 2015, Mr. Emanuel condemned what he said was a tendency of some officers to ignore, deny and in “some cases cover up the bad actions of a colleague or colleagues.”

This trial of the three officers stemmed from the 2014 death of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot 16 times by Jason Van Dyke, a police officer. The shooting was captured on a police dashboard camera video that horrified many Chicagoans, and Officer Van Dyke was convicted in October of second-degree murder in the death.

On Friday, Mr. Van Dyke will appear in a Cook County courtroom to be sentenced for his crimes.

In November, the three other officers were brought to trial. All were accused of lying after the shooting about what had happened, in order to cover up for Officer Van Dyke. Prosecutors said the police had shooed away eyewitnesses to the shooting rather than interview them, wrote in official reports that the teenager had tried to stab three officers, and said they saw him trying to get up from the ground even after the barrage of shots came.

The officers’ accounts contradicted the video of the shooting, which showed Officer Van Dyke firing repeatedly at Laquan as he moved slightly away from the officers and even as he lay crumpled on the ground. Prosecutors cited that footage repeatedly as they built a case against the officers on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice.

The officers — David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney — denied that they conspired to come up with a narrative that might justify Officer Van Dyke’s decision to shoot Laquan. None of them fired any shots that night. Other officers, too, had witnessed the shooting and had given questionable accounts, but were not on trial; grand jurors indicted the three officers but declined to indict any others.

A lawyer for Mr. Walsh, Officer Van Dyke’s partner on the night of the shooting who has resigned from the department, said his client had described what he saw. If that conflicted with video, it simply reflected different perceptions of the same information based on one’s viewpoint, the lawyer said.

Mr. March, who also resigned, was assigned to investigate the shooting, and merely wrote down what the witnesses told him had happened, a lawyer for Mr. March told the court.

Mr. Gaffney was one of the officers who first confronted Laquan on the evening of the shooting, after the police got a report of a man breaking into trucks on the city’s Southwest Side. Mr. Gaffney and other officers had followed the teenager, who was carrying a knife and ignoring orders to stop, for several blocks.

A lawyer for Mr. Gaffney told the court that his client had shown appropriate restraint on the night of the shooting, but was now being charged because the authorities “disagree with the report that he wrote.”

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