Chicago City Wire

In mid-December, a Cook County judge vacated the conviction of Brian Beals, who served 35 years in prison for the murder of a six-year-old. Now free, Beals is poised to follow the paths of dozens of others exonerated for their crimes; he’s well-connected with attorneys to fight for a big payoff through a wrongful conviction lawsuit in federal court. 

Beals' attorney, Laura Nirider, is co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, in addition to being directly connected with Michelle Mbekeani, the new head of State's attorney Kim Foxx's Conviction Review Unit. Nirider is listed as an advisor to Mbekeani’s side business, Periodsentence.com, for which Mbekeani was banned from a Cook County courtroom last month after a judge called out the prosecutor for running a company that connects inmates, claiming innocence, with defense attorneys. 

Such arrangements have paid off for both plaintiffs’ attorneys and their clients who seek post-conviction relief. 

This past summer, Chicago City Council approved a payout of $25 million for Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington, the two men convicted in the 1993 murder of college basketball star, Morgan Marshall Jr. Once Hood and Washington had their convictions vacated, they sued for wrongful conviction and reached the settlement just before trial was set to begin. Hood was represented by Loevy & Loevy, a Chicago plaintiff’s firm known for representing clients in similarly situated lawsuits.

Attorneys representing the retired detectives and others named in the civil cases brought by Hood and Washington argued that the exonerations and the settlement were won, not with the unveiling of new evidence, but in the court of public opinion, by winning over the media. 

Reporting on Beals could have a similar effect. 

The attorneys cited statements by Eva Nagao, former executive director of the Exoneration Project (EP), which hosted a 2015 panel discussion on the case at the University of Chicago Law School. EP is staffed by Loevy & Loevy attorneys.

“So we’re a quiet team,” Nagao said about midway through the discussion based on a transcript introduced in the case by defense attorneys, “that’s because I think, you know, unlike a lot of the Innocence Projects that people hear more regularly about in the media, the focus is mainly on litigation. This case (Tyrone Hood) has been really special for us because it was our first foray into -– not our first foray but maybe our biggest foray into really trying more dynamic ways of trying a case outside of the courts. And it was ultimately, you know, successful for Tyrone…’”

EP staff attorney, Karl Leonard, said during the discussion that “one of the big advantages that the Exoneration Project has is they have a lot of contacts in the media, and so timing it, I think, is the hard part. We know we have some friendly reporters who will report on these stories when we ask them to.”