Chicago City Wire

Defense attorneys for a group of retired Chicago detectives in two key wrongful conviction cases in federal court are battling some last-minute maneuvers by plaintiffs’ attorneys to introduce family photos of two convicted for the 1993 murder of college student Marshall Morgan Jr.

The plaintiffs in the cases are Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington, whose convictions for Marshall’s murder on the South Side were vacated in 2015.

“The photos of Plaintiffs with their respective families, including small children or grandchildren,” the attorneys argued in a June 6 motion in the case, “are intended to communicate to the jury that Plaintiffs have meaningful and loving family relationships to emphasize the loss of those relationships as a result being incarcerated, which directly impacts damages.”

“It is powerful evidence,” they continued, “that should have been disclosed years ago when the photos were taken. And the failure to do so matters, because, as set forth in Officer Defendants’ motion, there is discovery they could have done on the subject of these relationships.”

Introduction of the photos at the “eleventh hour just before trial” also violates a procedural rule intended to avoid unnecessary delays in the proceedings, the attorneys said.

The trials in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois are expected to begin some time this summer.

The Hood and Washington exonerations were part of a dozens of other exonerations of convicted murderers beginning under former Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, and continuing under Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Fox.

The former detectives named in the case include Kenneth Boudreau and Jack Halloran, who have been named in other wrongful conviction cases – some where abuse and forced confessions have been alleged.

Both have maintained they did nothing wrong in their investigations, and in the Hood/Washington cases their attorneys argued in earlier motions that biased media coverage of the cases, not new evidence, led to the exonerations.

In making his decision to commute Hood’s sentence, for example, Quinn admitted to relying heavily on a 2014 story about the crime by New Yorker reporter Nicholas Schmidle, a story that pointed to Morgan’s own father as the real killer.

“Critical facts were omitted from the story to cast doubt on Hood’s guilt and portray Morgan Sr. as the culprit,” defense attorneys said in an earlier motion. “For example, the story suggests that Morgan Sr. had a financial motive for the murder – he bought a life insurance police for his son just six months before his death.

“However, the article omits several important facts that undermines the insurance fraud theory and put the procurement of the policy in proper context,” the attorneys said. “Morgan Sr. had actually purchased life insurance for Morgan Jr. as far back as 1985, almost eight years before the murder, through a rider to his own life insurance policy.”

In addition, the New Yorker story suggests that the victim’s mother, Marcia Escoffery, believed that Morgan Sr. committed the crime and should be prosecuted for it.

But during a deposition in the case, Escoffery said she had been misquoted in the story, and that reporters had repeatedly pressured her to implicate Morgan Sr. in the crime.

In yet another civil case naming Boudreau, city attorneys deposed former prosecutors about their decision not to retry Nevest Coleman and Darryl Fulton for the 1994 rape and murder of Antwinica Bridgeman. In their court filings, the city attorneys allege that top Cook County prosecutors did not believe Coleman and Fulton were innocent, nor did they believe the detectives engaged in any misconduct in the case.