In November, the Chicago Tribune published a series of articles titled “The Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois,” which examined every death penalty conviction in the state since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977.
The articles were deeply unsettling.
“Capital punishment is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken,” the newspaper reported. “The Tribune has identified numerous fault lines running through the criminal justice system, subverting the notion that when the stakes are the highest, trials should be failsafe.”
Tribune reporter Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong reviewed 285 death row cases in Illinois and identified many of the same flaws that had contributed to death row exonerations not only in Illinois, but also across the nation. In the year since the conference at Northwestern, when the national tally of death row exonerees was seventy-four, the total had grown to eighty-four. Three of those exonerations were in Illinois.
The newspaper reported that 40 percent of the 285 Illinois death row convictions contained one or more of those red flags. Some had all of those dubious elements. The series was based upon an exhaustive analysis of appellate opinions and briefs, trial transcripts, and lawyer disciplinary records as well as interviews over several months with scores of witnesses, attorneys, and defendants. Their investigation found:
At least thirty-three times, a defendant sentenced to die was represented at trial by an attorney who had been disbarred or suspended at some point—sanctions reserved for conduct so incompetent, unethical, or even criminal that the lawyer’s license was taken away. In Kane County, an attorney was suspended for incompetence and dishonesty, but in 1997, ten days after his law license was reinstated, he was appointed to handle a death penalty defense.
In at least forty-six cases, prosecutors relied upon a jailhouse informant—a form of evidence that had been proven time and time again to be unreliable.
In at least twenty cases, the prosecution’s case was based in part on a microscopic hair comparison, a category of forensic evidence that not only was unreliable but was frequently exaggerated or outright falsified by crime lab analysts. In one case, hair that was said to be human was subsequently discovered to be dog hair!
Nearly two-thirds of the inmates on death row were black. In at least thirty-five cases, black defendants were convicted or sentenced by all white juries.
As an example of a case that contained all of these flaws, the newspaper cited the case of four black men—known as the “Ford Heights Four”—who had been convicted and exonerated in 1996 by DNA testing following another investigation by Northwestern University journalism students.
Kenneth Adams, Dennis Williams (who had urged me to commute Kokoraleis’s death sentence), Willie Rainge, and Verneal Jimerson were convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering twenty-three-year-old Carol Schmal and murdering her fiancé, twenty-nine-year-old Lawrence Lionberg. Williams and Jimerson were sentenced to death. Rainge was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Adams was sentenced to seventy-five years. Their convictions were based on part on the testimony of Paula Gray, a seventeen-year-old mildly intellectually-disabled woman who testified that she held up a lighted disposal lighter while the four men raped Schmal seven times. Williams was sentenced to die by an all-white jury after he was convicted on evidence that included a jailhouse informant and hair comparison. His defense attorney was later disbarred.
The case of the “Ford Heights Four” was one that just screamed injustice, practically from top to bottom. Years after the convictions, Northwestern University journalism students like the ones that later helped free Anthony Porter, began working on the case. They discovered a police file that revealed that within a week of the crime, a witness told police that they had the wrong men. The report said this witness also knew who committed the crime because he heard gunshots and saw four men run away from where the crime occurred. The next day, the report added, the witness saw these same four men selling items taken from the robbery of the victims. None of those four men were Adams, Williams, Rainge, or Jimerson.
After I met Rob Warden, he gave me a copy of his 1998 book, coauthored with David Protess, A Promise of Justice, which recounted how Williams and Rainge got a new trial because their defense lawyer was incompetent. At the retrial in 1987, which ended in convictions again, prosecutor Scott Arthur had countered defense arguments by saying: “Maybe the police made up all this evidence. . . . That’s too far-fetched. If you find the defendants innocent . . . . Do it because you believe the police framed these men—because that's what you would have to believe now.”
Following the journalism students’ discoveries, Williams, Adams, Rainge, and Jimerson were exonerated and three of the real killers—men who had been identified at the time of the crime—were convicted. The fourth man who had been identified had died by then.
DNA, I was learning, was an incredibly powerful tool in the criminal justice system. Originally used by the prosecution to confirm guilt, defense lawyers quickly realized it had the power to exclude the innocent as well.
The first two DNA exonerations in the United States occurred in 1989, and one of them—Gary Dotson—was in Illinois. The Dotson case was hugely important in the evolution of the innocence movement. Just three years later, in 1992, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld cofounded the Innocence Project in New York City to focus solely on exonerating defendants with DNA testing. In 1996, the Ford Heights Four exonerations had increased the total of DNA exonerations nationwide to thirty-nine. Ronald Jones, who was exonerated just months earlier, was the eighth man to walk off death row in the United States as a result of DNA testing. The first had been Kirk Bloodsworth in 1993 in Maryland.
After Adams, Williams, Rainge, and Jimerson were released, my predecessor, Governor Jim Edgar granted them pardons. Just before Kokoraleis was executed, the Ford Heights Four settled their federal lawsuit against Cook County for $36 million in damages—at the time the largest wrongful conviction settlement in US history.
Although I did not favor a moratorium, I still had questions. My unease was centered on the fairness of the system in Illinois. I had supported the concept of the death penalty, or at least I thought I did, but it was becoming clearer that the process used to determine who the state was going to kill didn’t meet the highest of standards that should be met. The outcome of the process, the conclusion, was irreversible, so as far as I was concerned, there should be no room for error. Yet there were errors all over the place in Illinois.
The issue was further complicated by the emotion that is attached to capital punishment. When you get past the black-and-white of the law, emotions on both sides take over. And there were compelling stories on both sides of the argument. In my mind, I went back and forth every time I was confronted with another horrid crime that prompted family and friends of the victim to scream that justice required the death penalty. And then just as quickly there would be another capital case that screamed injustice and incompetence on the part of police and prosecutors.
The false confession of Ronald Jones was troublesome to me. In the background was Jon Burge, who had been a Chicago Police Department lieutenant when he was fired by the City of Chicago in 1993. Burge, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had been in charge of a violent crimes detective unit that covered a large portion of the city’s South Side.
The unraveling of Jon Burge and the detectives who worked under him was preceded by a horrible crime. On February 9, 1982, officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien made a traffic stop. One of two men in the car took Fahey’s gun and shot him in the head and then shot O’Brien in the chest. Both officers died. They were the third and fourth officers killed in just a few weeks.
Five days after the shootings, police brought in two brothers, Andrew and Jackie Wilson, for questioning. Thirteen hours later, both confessed. Medical evidence would later show that Andrew Wilson had a torn retina, numerous bruises, burns on his chest and thighs, and other odd-shaped marks on his body.
They were tried together and both were convicted. Andrew Wilson was sentenced to death. Jackie was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The convictions were vacated by the Illinois Supreme Court. Andrew Wilson’s conviction was vacated after the court held that his confession was the result of physical coercion. “The inescapable conclusion is that [Wilson] suffered his injuries while in police custody that day,” the Court said. Jackie Wilson’s conviction also was reversed on other grounds. Both were reconvicted and both were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Andrew Wilson then sued the City of Chicago, Burge, and other detectives. During the proceedings, he testified that Burge and one of his detectives attached electroshock devices on his ears, fingers, nose, and his groin while he was handcuffed to rings on a wall next to a radiator that burned him.
Although detectives denied employing torture, other convicted inmates began recounting similar stories of physical torture, including claims that they had been “bagged,” in which detectives put plastic bags over their heads to nearly suffocate them. Some inmates recalled mock executions in which they were driven to a remote area and a shotgun barrel was put in their mouths and they were told to confess or they would be killed.
Wilson was ultimately awarded $1 million. Over the next several years, more than one hundred men would raise claims that Burge and his men had tortured them. Burge and his officers had been suspended without pay for more than a year. In 1993, the detectives were reinstated. Burge was fired. (Andrew Wilson died in prison in 2010. Jackie Wilson, who asserted that Burge detectives put a gun in his mouth, beat him over the head with a phone book, used electroshock, and kicked him, was granted a new trial in 2019 and released.)
Meanwhile, more lawsuits were filed. Inmates who called themselves the “Death Row 10” accused Burge or his detectives of torture to force them to confess.
That was troubling to me. If people are on death row because of a tortured confession—something is not right. There is something wrong with a system that’s willing to put someone to death and ignore these problems.
I had always believed that the police in general are good people and they’ve got an extraordinarily difficult job to do and they do what they have to do. But I also realized that they’re human and they make mistakes and at times engage in gross misconduct. And I was putting it together that when it comes to the death penalty, you can’t afford mistakes. You’re talking about taking somebody’s life.
Learning about Jon Burge and the torture of suspects with all kinds of almost medieval devices to confess to crimes—some of which they committed and some of which they didn’t—was especially terrifying. It raised the question of who was guilty and who was innocent. After that, how can you tell?
The allegations of torture against Burge and others became the most troubling question surrounding the use of the death penalty in Illinois. This was police and prosecutors—there were prosecutors assigned to police stations—bending and breaking the rule of law and order to win a conviction. I kept wondering how Burge got away with what he did for so long. More worrisome was the question of whether Burge was a stand-alone problem or was he the tip of an iceberg?
But still, for every time I heard Burge’s name and had to think about the effect his crimes had on the administration of justice, it wasn’t long before my brain balanced it out with the memory of a horrendous murder case that started, literally, in my backyard in Kankakee in 1987.