Attorneys for the Exoneration Project on Tuesday accused the Cook County state’s attorney of perpetuating police misconduct as they celebrated a judge’s ruling that overturned the 50th conviction in a murder case tied to a disgraced former Chicago police detective.
“Frankly, the fact that the state’s attorney office under Eileen O’Neill Burke has decided to fight these cases … It’s a repeating of Chicago’s dark history,” Exoneration Project attorney Lyla Wasz-Piper said. “The state’s attorney is continuing to perpetuate police misconduct.”
The comments will likely contribute to simmering tension between civil rights attorneys who work on wrongful conviction cases and the new state’s attorney who took office in January. They came shortly after Judge Carol Howard told Tyrece Williams that she was granting his motion to vacate his conviction for the 1990 death of 15-year-old Peter Cruz.
Williams has been out of prison for more than a decade after serving his full 20-year sentence. He has long maintained his innocence and said he was thankful that, after years of fighting, his family got to see the case come to a close.
“It’s just like doing time, you gotta wait,” Williams said of the decades he has fought to clear his name.
In her decision, Howard cited the lack of physical evidence against Williams, as well as the recent testimony of a witness who said he was beaten and threatened by former Chicago police Det. Reynaldo Guevara to identify Williams as the gunman who killed his friend.
In January, Wilfredo Torres took the stand and said he was with Cruz on the day he was attacked and saw a gunman wearing a sweatshirt with a tightly cinched hood shoot his friend.
Torres, who was 16 at the time, said in court that he repeatedly told police investigators that he couldn’t identify the gunman. But he was punched by Guevara and thrown into a wall at the police station so hard that he “saw stars,” he said. Guevara also threatened to put Torres in jail if he didn’t identify Williams.
Torres wrote in an affidavit that he testified against Williams “because I was young and scared” and feared detectives “would pin a case on me, like they were making me do for someone else.”
Howard noted in her ruling that rather than answering questions from Williams’ attorneys in a videotaped deposition, Guevara had repeatedly cited his right against self-incrimination, as he has done in other cases that were later overturned.
Dozens of witnesses have accused Guevara of using coercion and physical violence to force them to make false identifications in cases. At least 49 other cases he investigated as a detective have folded under misconduct allegations, though he has not been charged with any crime. He retired from the department in 2005.
Williams said it was hard for him to sit in the courtroom and listen when Torres took the stand again, even if this time it was to clear his name.
“We both were young,” Williams said Tuesday of Torres’ recantation. “Police do crazy stuff. They used him against me, but most of all, the same person who locked me up is the same person who set me free.”
Assistant States Attorney Linda Walls, who heads a unit that reviews alleged wrongful conviction cases, had warned that Torres shouldn’t take the stand without consulting with a lawyer because the office would investigate him for potential perjury charges.
His lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, accused O’Neill Burke of trying to intimidate her client and other potential witnesses from recanting their earlier testimony in exoneration cases tied to police misconduct.
On the stand, Torres declined to answer several questions from prosecutors, repeatedly stating that Bonjean had advised him not to answer.
Walls told the judge in January that she was only suggesting that Torres should seek legal advice, not issuing a threat. “We don’t know what Mr. Torres is going to say on the stand,” she said before he testified. “There were no threats to Mr. Torres.”
After Howard’s ruling, Walls asked for a court date later this month so her office has time to decide whether they want to appeal the judge’s decision.
Former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx made reviewing alleged innocence cases a priority of her administration, which looked at hundreds of cases that were allegedly corrupted by police misconduct overturned.
Still, Foxx was criticized at times by attorneys for defendants when her office fought motions to overturn their convictions or against issuing defendants a certificate of innocence, which requires the defendant to prove they are innocent and entitles them to money from a state fund.
Attorneys for defendants who say they were wrongfully convicted have expressed concerns that O’Neill Burke — a former appellate court justice who campaigned on a progressive platform but promised to take a tougher stance in criminal cases — has shown herself to be less receptive to evidence of their clients’ innocence than her predecessor.
On Tuesday, Exoneration Project attorney Wasz-Piper noted those concerns, calling it “astounding” that 50 murder convictions tied to Guevara have now been overturned by the courts.
“We’re hopeful that the administration will consider the fact that this is the 50th exoneration and work to take a more appropriate position and pursue what is truly justice, which is the truth in these cases,” she said.
“With respect to this particular matter, the decision to contest this case and proceed with an evidentiary hearing was made last summer, under the previous administration,” O’Neill Burke spokesman Matt McGrath said in a statement. “We are evaluating next steps in light of today’s ruling.”