Chicago City Wire

A recent WGN-TV profile of Josh Tepfer, a lawyer with the plantiffs’ firm of Loevy & Loevy, exemplifies mainstream media coverage of exoneration lawyers and their clients who blame their convictions on police misconduct. The lawyers and their clients good, police bad.

What the story says, for example, about former Tepfer client, Terril Swift (one of the Englewood Four), was that he was manipulated and intimidated by police into confessing to the rape and murder of prostitute Nina Glover in 1994.

Tepfer told WGN that Swift’s case was like others he has seen many times -- police misconduct resulting in false confessions.

The story quotes Swift as saying: “I’m 17, right? I’m in a police station being accused of a rape and a murder of someone I have no idea of. I’m literally crying for my mother for help. I was a mother’s boy and you’re literally telling me ‘You’re never going to see your mother again, you’re dying in jail for what you did to her.’ ‘What did I do, sir?’ That’s a torture.”

What the story doesn’t mention is that on three separate occasions Swift said he was treated well by police, including during his 1998 criminal trial for the murder.

One back-and-forth between prosecutor Robert Hovey and Swift went like this:

Q. Were you mistreated by the police in any way?

A. I wasn’t mistreated at all.

Q. Did they beat you up or anything?

A. No sir.

Q. Did they verbally threaten you?

A. No sir.

Q. Were they pretty nice to you?

A. Yes Sir.

In finding Swift guilty, Cook County Judge Thomas Sumner acknowledged that there was scant physical evidence in the case linking Swift to the crime, but he found the details of the crime iterated in the Swift confession convincing. And he found the defense’s assertion that the confession was somehow extracted or fabricated by police to be absurd.

“But the defense in this case is, and this is rather novel, I must admit that the defense in this case is that we have a 22-page confession because the police were too nice,” Judge Sumner said. “I will tell you what. If that is true then the police have found a new method by which to get confessions and certainly eliminate any possibility of lawsuits and motions to suppress, by golly. I don’t know why they didn’t think of this before. All they have to do is just inundate the accused with niceties; feed him, treat him like a king and he’ll just come clean.”

Then, in a 2014 deposition in his wrongful conviction case Swift pulled a 180.

“…and that's where various officers, like one at a time, they'll come in there and say, why did you beat this woman? Another one would come in and say, why did you guys strangle her? Then another one would come in and say, for that little bit of amount of money, you guys did this? Why did you, Mo-Mike, and all of the co-defendants, why did you guys throw her in the garbage? I'm like, what? I'm in a room. It's dark. I'm -- I'm crying. I don't know -- I -- I don't understand. I'm, like, what? What do you mean? And I had more threats. I had more threats at that point.”

Swift, along with the others in the Englewood Four, became wealthy when in 2017 Chicago City Council approved a $31 million settlement in the cases. Police and prosecutors were furious.

Appearing before City Council’s Finance Committee in December 2017 then Chicago FOP Second Vice President Martin Preib argued against the settlement saying that “powerful evidence” exists that the Englewood Four “were indeed involved in this crime” and that the notion that investigating detectives framed the teens “defies the simple facts of the investigation and plain common sense.”

“To believe the theory of misconduct in this case, you have to believe that a collection of detectives would conspire to frame men they had never met before for the rape and murder of a woman knowing that in doing so, the real killer would still be walking about likely to rape and kill again,” Preib said. “How can these investigators be certain that the real killer wouldn’t be discovered in a few weeks with evidence that would reveal their frame-up?”

One former detective, Kenneth Boudreau, named in the Englewood Four cases, and other wrongful conviction cases, has vowed to fight back against the lopsided media coverage and the multi-million-dollar payouts.

“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 in September. “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.”

Boudreau’s only crime, he told Chicago City Wire for an earlier story, was that he worked briefly under former Commander Jon Burge (now deceased) in the early 1990s. Burge was convicted in 2010 for perjury and obstruction of justice surrounding allegations that he tortured suspects. The Burge connection made Boudreau and other detectives, including his former partner Jack Halloran, easy targets in the wrongful conviction 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.”