Illinois Appellate Court Denies Exonerated Man's Innocence Certificate

By Amy Qin, Injustice Watch:

Wayne Washington spent 11 years in prison for a crime that he says he didn’t commit. He was 20 years old in 1993, when Cook County prosecutors charged him and his co-defendant, Tyrone Hood, for the murder of Marshall Morgan Jr. Morgan, a college student and standout basketball player at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was found lifeless in an abandoned car on Chicago’s South Side.

Washington, now in his 40s and the father of 12 children, maintains that two Chicago police detectives beat him until he confessed to the crime, and that he only agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a 25 year sentence in 1996 so he would “still have a chance at life.” He was released on parole in 2007 but lived for years after that with the stigma of being a convicted murderer.

However, an investigation published in 2014 by the New Yorker unearthed evidence that Morgan’s father was the likely culprit and brought more attention to the case. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office vacated Washington’s conviction a year later and dismissed the charges against him — shortly after then-Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn commuted Hood’s 75-year sentence.

Two brothers, two choices: a plea bargain’s toll on the innocent

Henry and Juan Johnson, wrongly convicted of murder, won a new trial after 11 years in prison. The prosecutor offered to let them walk free — if they pleaded guilty.

While Washington’s conviction was vacated, he’s still fighting an uphill battle for a certificate of innocence, a document that would clear his record, formally acknowledge his innocence and wrongful conviction, and allow him to seek financial restitution from the state. Karl Leonard, an attorney who represented Hood in his certificate petition, said the documents can also help people heal psychologically after a wrongful conviction.

“The declaration from the people who sent you to prison saying we got it wrong goes a long way in helping people cope with what happened to them,” Leonard said.

Washington petitioned for a certificate in 2015. Cook County Circuit Court Associate Judge Domenica A. Stephenson denied his request, so he and his lawyer, Steven Greenberg, filed an appeal with the First District Appellate Court. But on Monday, the appellate court affirmed Stephenson’s ruling on the 2-1 decision backed by Appellate Judges Mary Ellen Coghlan and Daniel James Pierce. (Coghlan was recently retained by Cook County voters in the 2020 election, and Pierce is up for retention in 2022.)

The outcome Monday, and the Circuit Court decision before it, did not center on Washington’s innocence. Instead, the judges cited a technicality in state law to assert that he voluntarily brought about his conviction when he pleaded guilty.

Appellate Judge Carl Anthony Walker authored a dissent departing from his colleagues’ interpretation and warning of the broader implications of their opinion, writing that “wrongful convictions and accusations like these can devastate families, foreclose career opportunities, and undermine the integrity of our justice system.”

“Washington deserves the state’s assistance in his recovery from the consequences of the offenses police committed against him,” wrote Walker, who Cook County voters retained in the 2018 election. “The majority’s denial of that assistance continues the difficulty associated with the too-many wrongful accusations against Black and brown people.”

Greenberg said he was “pissed” when he read the majority opinion. He thinks the appellate court violated the spirit of the innocence certificate.

“The purpose of the statute is to right a wrong, to compensate those who have suffered because they were framed,” Greenberg said. “And no one disputes that Wayne was framed.”

‘If you’re beaten into confession, that doesn’t seem very voluntary to me’

Washington declined to be interviewed for this article.

“He doesn’t want to say anything other than he feels like a victim again,” Greenberg wrote in a text message to Injustice Watch.

Washington was inside a corner store on the South Side several days after Morgan’s body was found when Kenneth Boudreau and John Halloran, the two Chicago police detectives, arrested him and Hood and drove them to the police station for interrogation, according to an article in the National Registry of Exonerations.

‘Who is James Gibson?’ Exonerated Chicago police torture survivor reflects on identity, faith, and reentry after 29 years in prison

Gibson, 54, spent nearly 30 years behind bars after he says he was beaten into confessing to two 1989 murders. In an essay, Gibson recounts how his wrongful conviction and long fight for freedom robbed him of his identity, and how he’s trying to move forward.

Washington first denied any involvement in Morgan’s murder but later confessed to the crime, according to an ongoing civil rights lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago. The lawsuit claims that police punched and slapped Washington while he was handcuffed, and that officers said another man had implicated him in Morgan’s murder — until he agreed to sign a confession.

Court records show that the purported tipster and other supposed witnesses later recanted their statements, saying the detectives had coerced them to support the case against Washington and Hood. Boudreau and Halloran, who worked under former police Cmdr. Jon Burge, have faced multiple accusations of misconduct for beating suspects to obtain confessions.

Before Washington plead guilty in 1996, Hood, who maintained his innocence despite the beatings, was sentenced to 75 years in prison after he unsuccessfully fought his case. The same three-judge panel that denied Washington a certificate of innocence recently granted one to Hood because he had never pleaded guilty or confessed to the crime.

The majority opinion issued by the appellate court on Monday, written by Pierce, denied Washington’s petition “not because the petitioner failed to prove his innocence” but because Washington’s case didn’t meet one of several requirements to grant a certificate of innocence in Illinois.

Specifically, Coghlan and Pierce argued that Washington was not eligible for the certificate “because, by his own conduct, he voluntarily brought about his own conviction by giving a statement to police and pleading guilty.”

The lone dissenting judge, Walker, argued that Washington should not be barred from his certificate because his confession was physically coerced from him, and that he did not purposely try to mislead the detectives.

Walker contended that a defendant’s decision to plead guilty often has nothing to do with their guilt. He cited case law suggesting that the criminal justice system encourages people to engage in a “cost-benefit assessment” in the hopes of securing a more lenient but inevitable sentence.

In other words: Many defendants might not risk fighting a case and getting a harsher sentence, even if they are innocent.

Leonard hopes that the decision in Washington’s case will spur legislative changes to the way that certificates are granted. He thinks there has to be a better definition of what “voluntary” means in bringing about someone’s conviction.

“If you’re beaten into confession, that doesn’t seem very voluntary to me, and if you end up in a situation where you feel your only choices are to plead guilty or spend your life in prison, that doesn’t seem very voluntary to me, either,” Leonard said.

Greenberg said he intends to take their fight to the Illinois Supreme Court.

“They’re gonna hear this one for sure,” he said.

Injustice Watch is a non-partisan, not-for-profit, multimedia journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. For more stories from Injustice Watch, visit InjusticeWatch.org.