Chicago City Wire

Two former assistant Cook County state’s attorneys named in a wrongful conviction lawsuit filed by Reginald Henderson, convicted in 1996 of the murder of a ten-year-old boy, filed a point-by-point repudiation in federal court to allegations made by Henderson in an amended complaint.

In his wrongful conviction lawsuit filed in July 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District, Henderson named former ASA’s Virginia Bigane, Steven Klaczynski and former detectives, claiming they targeted him and tortured into confessing to the 1994 murder of Rodney Collins on the South Side. Henderson was convicted in 1996. 

His brother, Sean Tyler, was also convicted of the murder a year earlier. 

The brothers spent more than 23 years in jail before their convictions were vacated in 2021. Tyler filed a separate wrongful conviction lawsuit in 2023.  

In their December 27 response to Henderson’s amended complaint, Bigane and Klaczynski denied Henderson’s assertion that he did not commit the Collins murder, that they conspired with others to convict Henderson, and that they, along with the investigating police officers, were motivated by revenge because the brothers had earlier exposed police misconduct.

Bigane and Klaczynski, moreover, argued that Judge Thomas Durkin should dismiss the case against them since as former prosecutors “plaintiff’s claims are barred on the basis of absolute prosecutorial immunity.”

Judge Durkin on January 3 granted the police defendants in the case, former detectives Kenneth Boudreau, James O'Brien, John Halloran, Michael Clancy, and Patrick Golden additional time— until January 15 —to file their responses to Henderson’s amended complaint.

In December, lawyers for the former detectives asked the judge to consolidate the cases, arguing that the “Henderson and Tyler are virtually identical lawsuits…”

“Both cases arise from the exact same occurrences—the Plaintiffs’ arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and reversals of those convictions by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office for Case the murder of Rodney Collins— and both Plaintiffs allege the exact same issues of fact and law,” the lawyers said.

Judge Durkin has yet to rule on that request.

The case has become a flash point for at least one former detective, Kenneth Boudreau, named in this suit and at least a dozen others claiming he participated in torturing suspects. Boudreau has announced a public relations campaign to begin in the new year to push back on the claims of the once convicted murderers, the lawyers representing them, and the mainstream media for parroting the narrative that the Chicago Police Department has a sordid history of torturing suspects to confess to murders they did not commit.

“They are nothing but mouthpieces for the attorneys bringing the lawsuits,” Boudreau said of the media for an earlier story. “Everything is in false light.”

The Tyler and Henderson wrongful conviction complaints, and a news story, published in the Chicago Sun-Times, tells of an elaborate scheme by detectives to frame the brothers as part of a vendetta stemming from Tyler’s testimony for the defense in a separate shooting case.

Citing the wrongful conviction complaints, the Sun-Times story said that Tyler, who was 17 at the time, was then taken into custody and beaten “so severely in the chest, face and eyes that he was later taken to the hospital for vomiting blood.”

The story mentions Boudreau and his partner at the time, James O’Brien.

But an investigation by the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which in 2020 in a “close case” recommended a new evidentiary hearing for Tyler, noted that the doctor who treated Tyler said that he had a history of hematemesis, the vomiting of blood caused by a stomach ulcer or severe gastritis. In addition, Tyler never told the doctor, nor any other medical professional, that his injuries were the result of police torture. And the lockup keeper at the jail said that Tyler had no outward signs of physical harm and that he never complained about police mistreatment.

What’s more, Boudreau told Chicago City Wire that he never interviewed Tyler – “never met him,” he said.

The TIRC report also noted that an attorney with the Exoneration Project filed an amended petition in 2008 that included a recantation from a key witness who originally identified Tyler in the shooting. The petition alleged that detectives, including O’Brien, Boudreau and John Halloran, had pressured the witness to identify Tyler.

But the judge in the case denied a hearing on the abuse claims, in part finding the theory against O’Brien, Halloran and Boudreau “pure speculation.”

The Sun-Times report also said that the reason police targeted Tyler and his brother was because Tyler had testified for the defense in the case of 13-year-old Marcus Wiggins, “who claimed he confessed to a 1991 murder after he was beaten and shocked by the two detectives…”

Boudreau said that he never interviewed Wiggins and that Wiggins never accused him of torture.

Henderson’s lawyer in the wrongful conviction case, Jennifer Bonjean, was granted an extension by the court to file a response to the motion. The plaintiffs’ firm of Loevy & Loevy is representing Tyler.