Chicago City Wire

Last week, a Cook County judge granted brothers Sean Tyler and Reginald Henderson, convicted of the 1994 murder of a ten-year-old boy on the South Side, Certificates of Innocence (COIs). A COI is a near guarantee of a substantial payout in a wrongful conviction lawsuit, which the brothers filed separately in federal court in July 2023.

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, headed by Kim Foxx, paved the way for the payouts by dropping its opposition, without explanation, to the COIs. The office did not respond to a request from Chicago City Wire why it reversed course on the case.

Kenneth Boudreau, a retired detective named in the civil lawsuits filed by the brothers, called the granting of the COIs to Tyler and Henderson “one hundred percent pathetic” in a case where “a ten-year-old boy riding his bike he just received as a birthday present was murdered.”

Boudreau is a defendant in the lawsuit even though he had minimal association with it. But he and other former detectives have become targets in dozens of wrongful conviction lawsuits due to a past association with former Commander Jon Burge, who in 2010 was convicted of perjury surrounding allegations that he tortured suspects into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit. Burge died in 2018.

Tyler and Henderson spent 27 years in prison before Foxx vacated their convictions in 2021.

This even though the Appellate Court in 1998 on direct appeal of the Tyler case “affirmed defendant’s conviction but remanded for resentencing…”

In 2015, the court reversed and remanded for "for the limited purpose of requiring the trial court to conduct a third-stage evidentiary hearing on defendant’s coerced confession claim, and we affirm the dismissal of all of defendant’s other claims."

In its opinion, the court also summarized Tyler’s legal efforts to have his conviction overturned:

“On October 22, 1998, defendant filed a petition for post-conviction relief, which later advanced to the second stage. Defendant filed an amended petition on September 16, 2008, raising multiple claims including due process violations, ineffective assistance of counsel, and a claim of actual innocence. The trial court dismissed five of defendant’s claims through a partial grant of the State’s motion to dismiss on October 15, 2009, and dismissed the remaining claims following a third-stage evidentiary hearing on October 25, 2012.”

Boudreau’s name does not appear in the 2015 opinion.

The Tyler and Henderson civil complaints, and a story published in the Chicago Sun-Times, tell 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 for an earlier story, he never interviewed Tyler – and “never met him.”

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.

Since her election in 2016, Foxx has exonerated over 250. She announced in 2023 that she would not run for re-election. In the March Democratic primary race to replace her, Eileen O’Neill Burke defeated Clayton Harris III. Burke faces Republican Bob Fioretti in November.