Chicago City Wire

Biased media coverage, not the uncovering of new evidence, led to the 2015 commutation of the sentence of convicted murderer Tyrone Hood, attorneys for city detectives named in a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit say, and they are planning to introduce damning statements from a past associate of Hood’s attorneys to prove it.

Hood, and his accomplice Wayne Washington, were both convicted of the 1993 murder of college basketball star Marshall Morgan Jr. Washington likewise had his conviction vacated, and now both have wrongful conviction cases pending in U.S District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

At trial, the defense plans to introduce statements by Eva Nagao, a former paralegal at Hood’s law firm, Loevy & Loevy, and former executive director of the Exoneration Project (EP), which hosted a 2015 panel discussion on the case at the University of Chicago Law School. EP is staffed by Loevy & Loevy attorneys.

“So we’re a quiet team,” Nagao said about midway through the discussion based on a transcript introduced in the case by defense attorneys, “that’s because I think, you know, unlike a lot of the Innocence Projects that people hear more regularly about in the media, the focus is mainly on litigation.· This case (Tyrone Hood) has been really special for us because it was our first foray into -– not our first foray but maybe our biggest foray into really trying more dynamic ways of trying a case outside of the courts.· And it was ultimately, you know, successful for Tyrone…’”

Current EP staff attorney, Karl Leonard, said during the discussion that “one of the big advantages that the Exoneration Project has is they have a lot of contacts in the media, and so timing it, I think, is the hard part. We know we have some friendly reporters who will report on these stories when we ask them to.”

One of the friendly reporters was Nicholas Schmidle of The New Yorker magazine who in 2014 wrote a story implicating Morgan’s own father in the murder – murdered for insurance money the story implied. That story prompted former Gov. Pat Quinn, who participated in the EP panel discussion, to commute Hood’s sentence, which he did on his last day in office.

“The New Yorker magazine deserved a lot of credit,” Quinn said, “and in the case of Tyrone’s case, or their very good reporter had delved into it and saw a lot of the troublesome issues with respect to the prosecution of Tyrone Hood, wrote an article about it, and that did raise attention.”

Except that defense attorneys argue that the New Yorker story contained some key errors.

“Critical facts were omitted from the story to cast doubt on Hood’s guilt and portray Morgan Sr. as the culprit,” the attorneys said. “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 suggested 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.

The attorneys also cite the role of former NBC Chicago reporter, Renee Ferguson.

“Ferguson had taken a keen interest in Hood’s case from her days as a reporter and worked closely with Hood’s attorneys to craft a media campaign to pressure public officials,” the attorneys said. “In one email she wrote to one of Hood’s attorneys, Ferguson warned that media pressure had to be ‘carefully managed’ because it can be a ‘double edged sword,' meaning it could backfire.”

Finally, defense attorneys wrote that “no evidence that would stand up in court exists to exonerate Tyrone Hood for his role in the murder of Marshall Morgan Jr.”

The trial is expected to begin some time this summer.