Chicago City Wire

In a shocking development, settlements have been reached in the wrongful conviction cases of Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington, convicted of the 1993 murder of college basketball star Morgan Marshall Jr.

The case in federal court was expected to go to trial sometime this summer with a retired detective named in the case, Kenneth Boudreau, saying for an earlier story that he and his former partner Jack Halloran were willing to testify that they did not force Hood and Washington, as the two allege, to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Both detectives have been named in other wrongful conviction cases, but insist they did nothing wrong in their investigations.

“I have absolutely no problem revisiting cases where new evidence comes to light,” Boudreau told The Cook County Record. “Those cases deserve another look. But not cases based on the media or politics, where witnesses from 30 years ago recant testimony, don’t want to testify again or aren’t around to testify.”

“As God as my witness, we did nothing wrong,” he added.

Details of the settlement were unclear and an attorney representing the detectives did not respond to a request for comment.

The settlement agreement has to go before City Council. Alderman Nick Sposato (38th Ward), who has voted no on some prior settlements, told Chicago City Wire that he will attend the briefing by the city’s Corporation Counsel (not yet scheduled), as he has other past briefings on proposed settlements.

“I’ll scrutinize this like the others,” Sposato said. “We have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers. It baffles me how some in Council vote yes automatically on these without attending the briefings.”

In court filings, the attorneys argued that the exonerations were the product of an “intense media campaign” rather than the uncovering of new evidence.

No evidence that would stand up in court exists to exonerate Tyrone Hood for his role in the murder of Marshall Morgan Jr., the attorneys stated in a response to a motion by Hood’s attorneys to bar the evidence of the media’s role in the case.

“Rather, it (the eventual reversal of the conviction) was the product of an intense media campaign by Hood’s attorneys involving local and international celebrities, ‘friendly reporters’ and, primarily, The New Yorker Magazine,” the response states.

In a 2014 story, the New Yorker Magazine published a story implicating Morgan’s own father in the murder – murdered for insurance money the story implied. That story prompted former Gov. Pat Quinn, to commute Hood’s sentence, which he did on his last day in office in 2015.

“The New Yorker magazine deserved a lot of credit,” Quinn said in a  panel discussion hosted by the Exoneration Project in 2015, “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.