Chicago City Wire

The lineup of speakers at an upcoming wrongful conviction symposium hosted by the DePaul University College of Law consists purely of advocates for the incarcerated who claim that police and prosecutors framed, coerced, and in some cases tortured them into confessing to crimes they did not commit. Not making the list are speakers who have questioned the legitimacy of many wrongful conviction cases as being driven by activists and plaintiffs’ attorneys, capitalizing and enriching themselves, from anti-police sentiment. 

Chicago City Wire has covered some of these cases; the stories include interviews with former detectives and prosecutors who insist that the police investigations were sound, and those convicted were guilty of their crimes. As previously reported, Cook County's post-conviction process has Illinois leading the nation in exonerations.

“The Journal for Social Justice Symposium will shine a spotlight on the wrongful conviction crisis in Chicago and America,” reads a description of the March 7 event at DePaul. “You will hear stories about redemption from individuals wrongfully convicted of crimes, and attorneys and analysts will discuss the data, policies and efforts being implemented to ensure the integrity of the criminal justice system is preserved.”

The scheduled speakers include Michelle Mbekeani, the new head of the post-conviction unit in State's attorney Kim Foxx’s office, who was also recently banned from a judge’s courtroom over a conflict of interest; Maurice Possley, former investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune; Jarrett Adams, an attorney specializing in wrongful conviction cases; Brian Beals, a recent exoneree also reported on by City Wire; Lauren Kaeseberg, co-director of the Chicago office of the Illinois Innocence Project.

Law School Dean Jennifer Rosato Perea did not respond to a Chicago City Wire inquiry asking why the symposium doesn't include one speaker with opposing views.

One of the leading experts of the “exoneration industry” is former Chicago Fraternal Order of Police spokesman, Martin Preib, who has spent over a decade researching many of the wrongful conviction cases that resulted in the approval of multi-million-dollar payouts by Chicago City Council. 

Many had their beginnings in accusations of torture against former Area 2 Commander Jon Burge. Burge was convicted in federal court of perjury in 2010 and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He died in 2018.

In his 2018 book Burn Patterns, Preib dives into one of the earliest Burge cases: Madison Hobley, who was convicted in the 1987 arson murders of seven people, including his wife and one-year old son, Philip.

Preib recounts the evidence against Hobley, including eyewitness accounts of his buying gasoline at a gas station around the corner from the fire, failing a lie detector, and twice confessing to the murders. He was convicted in 1990 and sentenced to death. The two investigating detectives, Robert Dwyer and James Lotito, worked under Burge.

In 2000, with Hobley maintaining from prison that he was tortured into confessing, Andre Council, one of two witnesses who saw Hobley buy the gasoline, said in a deposition in a case against Burge that he was approached at his home by former DePaul Law School Professor Andrea Lyon, now in private practice, and a man he identified as Ciolino. The lawyer questioning Council in the deposition was Kurt Feuer, who with Lyon in 1995 filed a petition for post-conviction relief for Hobley. Council said that Lyon and Ciolino promised his daughter a free ride at DePaul and more f he would change his testimony.

Feuer: “Okay. All right. She said your kids at least your daughter could go to DePaul for no tuition, and she could get them in?

Council: “She take care of it. Yes, she told me. And she told me you know she kept telling me that Madison Hobley wasn’t the one. Same thing I told them in court. I told the court exactly what she told me."

Feuer: “Okay, Is Ms. Lyon also the one who told you that if you change your testimony you’d never have to work another day in your life.”

Council: “Yes she did. The gentleman that was with her as well.”

Lyon responded to an email from City Wire asking about Council’s testimony. “That never happened,” Lyon wrote.

Council said in the deposition that he rejected the offer. Nonetheless, in 2003 then Gov. George Ryan, facing legal trouble of his own, pardoned Hobley and three others convicted of murder. This, even though over the years Hobley was unable to convince judges or prosecutors that he was wrongly convicted. In 2007, City Council approved a $7.5 million payout for Hobley and his lawyers.

On the day of the pardons, Cook County State’s Attorney at the time, Richard A. Devine, released a statement calling them ''outrageous and unconscionable.''

''These cases against these men are still before our courts, and it is the courts that should decide the issues in these cases,'' Devine said. ''By his actions today the governor has breached faith with the memory of the dead victims, their families and the people he was elected to serve.''

In 2008, then U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) were “actively investigating” the fire, with Hobley as the focus, according to a 2008 Chicago Tribune report. Hobley could have been charged again for the crime since arson is a federal offense.

But the 2008 election of former Chicago community activist Barack Obama as president changed all that, Preib wrote in April 2022 in The Contrarian. Also complicating the investigation was the fact, Preib said, that Fitzgerald at the same time was considering charges against Burge for perjury and obstruction of justice.

“So who would Fitzgerald indict, Hobley or Burge?” Preib wrote. “It would be difficult to indict both, particularly as the 2008 presidential election unfolded. The ATF agents completed their investigation and assumed charges against Hobley were forthcoming, but as the presidential election came to the finish line, the charges came for Burge, not Hobley.”

One of the lead ATF investigators, James DeLorto, was stunned.

"The evidence in the Hobley arson case is so overwhelming and of such specific detail and volume that no jury in any court would not have found him guilty beyond any doubt,” The Contrarian quoted him as saying. “In my eight years as supervisor of the ATF federal bomb and arson task force, there has never been a clearer case of guilt. For the federal government not to have pursued this case, in which seven African Americans were burned to death, was unconscionable and unprecedented.”