Chicago City Wire

City Council’s approval this week of a $25 million payout to two men convicted of the 1993 murder college basketball star Marshall Morgan Jr. was about all that former Chicago Detective Kenneth Boudreau, who investigated the murder, could take.

Boudreau is taking on the media and lawyers, representing those exonerated of their crimes, who he said are complicit in a public relations campaign to smear him, his former partner, and other detectives and police officers named in dozens of wrongful conviction lawsuits. 

Chicago Police Department

“Today I am announcing that I will be hosting a presentation sometime in January on the fleecing of Chicago out of millions of dollars by claiming wrongful convictions,” Boudreau said in a statement released to Chicago City Wire. “We will examine the evidence, grand jury testimony, pretrial testimony, trial testimony, post-conviction testimony through third stage testimony to the TIRC (Torture Inquiry & Relief Commission) pleadings, correspondence among similarly situated convicted murderers throughout the years and how their narrative changes to fit the strategy of their civil attorneys.”

Other issues raised, he wrote, will be the fact that the police have no say in the settlement process, and “we will discuss the ethics of certain attorneys who encourage and used suborned perjury to make money while trampling on the graves of all concerned.”

This case leading to this week’s payout, one of the largest ever, is typical of the other cases already settled or in the pipeline.

The two convicted of the Morgan murder, Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington, claimed that Boudreau and his then partner, Jack Halloran, fabricated evidence, and pressured witnesses to testify against them. Washington also said he was beaten into a false confession.

The media ran with the allegations against the detectives without even the pretense of presenting a balanced story, Boudreau told Chicago City Wire in an interview.

“They are nothing but mouthpieces for the attorneys bringing the lawsuits,” he said. “Everything is in false light.”

The media reports have a profound impact on public officials. Former Gov. Pat Quinn, commuted Hood’s sentence in 2015, relying on the facts in a 2014 New Yorker magazine story, according to a court filing by city attorneys representing the former detectives.

Quinn admitted as much in a 2015 panel discussion at the University of Chicago Law School that the New Yorker story strongly influenced his decision. In the story by Nicholas Schmidle, Hood claimed that detectives “slapped him in the head and thrust a gun in his face” in an attempt to get him to confess. Schmidle also pointed to Morgan’s father as the real killer. But the story, the city attorneys say, omitted key facts, and misquoted Morgan’s mother implicating her son’s father in the murder.

Another part of the case never covered by mainstream media outlets was the fact that city attorneys in the Hood and Washington wrongful conviction cases presented evidence that a key witness to the Morgan murder was pressured by a gang member to recant his testimony.

In another example, the media reported that Boudreau was named in the complaints of the wrongful conviction suits of the Englewood Four, convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of known prostitute Nina Glover.

What wasn’t reported was that Boudreau’s work on the case amounted only to interviewing one of the four, Terrill Swift, for 20 minutes. Also not reported was the fact that Boudreau’s name never came up in the depositions of the four in their civil cases.

In his statement, Boudreau included a message to the survivors of the victims: “I know that you have been victimized again and I am cognizant of your pain. But know this, we did our investigations with integrity. The lord knows my conscious is clear and the truth needs to be told.”