Two former Cook County prosecutors have been acquitted of misconduct charges in a high-profile wrongful conviction case stemming from the murders of two Chicago police officers in the 1980s.
The acquittal was handed down Wednesday by Lake County Judge Daniel Shanes, who found former assistant state’s attorneys Nichloas Trutenko and T. Andrew Horvat not guilty of wrongdoing in the botched prosecution of Jackie Wilson for the murders.
But the judge harshly criticized other prosecutors involved in the case, including those who handled Wilson’s retrial in 2020 and those who later investigated how Wilson’s case fell apart.
In his 52-page ruling, Shanes described the work of prosecutors at the retrial as “disturbingly awash with inexperience and amateurism,” and said the misconduct case brought against Horvat and Trutenko was “the ornate facade of a Potemkin trial, tantalizing and exciting while marginally relevant, papering over holes in the proofs.”
Wilson was charged in 1982 killing of Officers Richard O’Brien and William Fahey, who were gunned down after stopping a car containing Wilson and his brother Andrew Wilson.
As the officers tried to arrest the brothers, Andrew Wilson grabbed Fahey’s revolver and shot both officers dead. The brothers were convicted at trial the following year, but allegations of brutal torture by detectives under disgraced Chicago police commander Jon Burge led to retrials for the brothers.
Both were again convicted and sentenced to life, with Trutenko leading the prosecution of Jackie Wilson.
Jackie Wilson’s second trial featured testimony from a jailhouse informant, William Coleman, who said he heard Jackie Wilson admit to a role in the killings while the two were in Cook County Jail.
Trutenko allegedly negotiated sweetheart deals with federal proscutors that saw Coleman, jailed on drug charges, released within months of his testimony and returned to his home country of England. Both brothers were convicted again and Andrew Wilson died in prison in 2007.
Trutenko and Coleman remained close friends for decades — facts Trutenko did not reveal to defense lawyers, or to the special prosecutors who were assigned to try Jackie Wilson a third time in 2020 and were looking for Coleman.
Trutenko revealed on the witness stand his long friendship with Coleman, and the special prosecutors subsequently dropped the case against Wilson. Trutenko was fired by the state’s attorney’s office an hour after he got off the stand and Horvat, a civil attorney assigned by the state’s attorney’s office to serve as Trutenko’s lawyer, was fired six months later.
Horvat claimed he learned about Trutenko’s friendship with Coleman the night before Trutenko testified, and told the special prosecutors to avoid asking Trutenko about it on the stand, stating, “It’s nothing illegal, it’s nothing unethical, it’s just weird.”
A year later, a special prosecutor assigned to investigate the handling of Jackie Wilson’s case charged Trutenko with perjury, obstruction of justice, official misconduct and violating a local records act.
Horvat was charged with multiple counts of official misconduct.
The special prosecutors accused Trutenko of hiding his relationship with Coleman to protect his reputation and secure a conviction against Jackie Wilson. They said Horvat should have disclosed what he had learned about Trutenko and Coleman’s relationship.
Trutenko’s defense countered that he hadn’t lied but hadn’t been asked the right questions and had misspoke on the stand in 2020.
Horvat’s attorney argued that Horvat couldn’t reveal the information due to attorney-client privilege.
Trutenko is now retired and Horvat is in private practice.
“Nick and Andrew never should have been charged, never should have been indicted,” Trutenko’s defense attorney Jim McKay told the Sun-Times. “This was a false narrative… And there was actually no evidence to support that narrative and charge these two men.”
McKay said Trutenko was grateful for the judge’s ruling, which McKay said found “there was an overwhelming lack of evidence and law” to support the charges against his client.
Horvat’s attorney, Terry Ekl, on Wednesday praised the judge’s acquittal, and said Horvat was considering “future legal action” against Special Prosecutor Lawrence Oliver. Horvat was fired from his job in the the State’s Attorney’s Civil Division about six months after the Wilson case was dropped, and he has worked in private practice since.
“This case was a travesty, to indict these guys, especially Horvat, with the lack of evidence they needed to even charge them,” Ekl said. “This was an instance where the special prosecutor came in with a plan to charge them, and he twisted the law and the facts to get an indictment.”
Wilson was eventually issued a certificate of innocence and settled a civil suit with the county for $17 million. A federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago is still pending.
Wilson’s attorney, Elliot Slosar, with the Exoneration Project, called the judge’s ruling “a travesty.”
“There are two systems of justice: one that protects people like Trutenko and Horvat and another that enables unconstitutional conduct committed against humans like Jackie,” Slosar said in a written statement to the Sun-Times.