For the past several years, the plaintiffs’ bar has relied on the Torture Inquiry & Relief Commission (TIRC) for a steady stream of lucrative wrongful conviction lawsuits stemming from claims that Chicago police coerced murder confessions. Many of the cases end up getting settled out of court, with the payouts, after approval by Chicago City Council, running into the millions.
But a recent ruling by a Will County judge that called TIRC’s very legitimacy into question gives some measure of hope to former police detectives saying they are the ones, not the convicted murders, who are the victims of false accusations.
The October 20 ruling centers on the post-conviction hearings of two, Kevin Murray convicted of a 1987 double murder and Devon Daniels, convicted of a 1996 double murder. The 13-member TIRC commission referred both for new evidentiary hearings based on claims of abuse by former Det. Kriston Kato. A special prosecutor in the case, Maria McCarthy, argued in part that the state law creating TIRC in 2009 incorporates an administrative law, which undermines TIRC's authority to refer cases for new evidentiary hearings.
In a blow to Daniels and Murray and their lawyers, Judge David Carlson called TIRC “very perilous to our system” and dismissed their TIRC referrals.
“There is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I think that is absolutely appropriate when reviewing the TIRC statute,” Carlson said. “The act itself skirts very closely to the edge of constitutionality. It also calls into question whether or not the TIRC statute in and of itself impugns the integrity of the judicial system of the third branch of government…”
McCarthy’s arguments, which also challenged TIRC on constitutional grounds, could be taken up by other attorneys representing the former detectives - the defendants in the wrongful conviction cases.
In fact, six years ago the union representing Chicago police, FOP Lodge 7, received a legal analysis that poked holes in TIRC’s authority. The opinion by the law firm of Cameli & Hoag, P.C., said that a “reasonable argument can be made that TIRC is unconstitutional under three separate areas of the Illinois Constitution.”
The FOP never acted on the findings.
“It was one of the great failures of our FOP administration not to get TIRC declared unconstitutional years ago,” former FOP spokesman Martin Preib said for an earlier story. “Many members would have been saved from false accusations by this politically driven commission. Any first-year law student could see it was a constitutional travesty. The creation of TIRC was one of the first signs that the criminal justice system was becoming politicized on behalf of the radical left, a trend that is now national.”
Given Judge Carlson's ruling, It's unclear if the FOP would now challenge TIRC’s constitutionality in court; a request for comment from FOP President John Catanzaro was not returned.
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