Chicago City Wire

Attorneys for police accused of torturing two brothers to win a conviction for the 1994 murder of a ten-year-old boy are asking a federal judge presiding over their wrongful conviction trials for access to the medical records of the brothers. 

Sean Tyler and Reginald Henderson claim that former Chicago Detective Kenneth Boudreau and others tortured them into the confessing to the murder of Rodney Collins, killed in the Back of the Yards in a crossfire of a gang shoot out. Tyler and Henderson claim they're suffering from the effects of the abuse to this day, but want to maintain the right to screen medical records that are released to defenses attorneys.  

“As to Tyler and Henderson’s mental health records,” the lawyers stated in their motion for HIPPA and mental health protective order, “Defendants do not come before this Court arguing that Tyler or Henderson has waived the psychotherapist privilege by simply filing this lawsuit and alleging damages for emotional distress. Rather, Defendants maintain—consistent with the law in the Seventh Circuit—that when a Plaintiff places his psychological state at issue, Defendants have a right to conduct discovery into those claims through his medical and mental health records.”

“Courts have been very clear that a party ‘cannot use a privilege as both a shield and a sword,’” they added later in the motion.

The case is before Judge Thomas Durkin in U.S. District Court for the Northern District.

Tyler and Henderson spent 25 years in prison before Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx exonerated them in 2021. In April of this year a Cook County judge granted them Certificates of Innocence (COIs). They filed wrongful conviction lawsuits in the U.S. District Court in 2023.

The Tyler and Henderson civil complaints 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, a 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.

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.

For an earlier story, Boudreau called the granting of the COIs to Tyler and Henderson “one hundred percent pathetic.”