Chicago City Wire

Plaintiffs’ lawyers and their allies in the mainstream media are already putting new State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke on notice not to upset the slick arrangements they had with Burke predecessor Kim Foxx when it comes to exonerations of convicted murderers. 

A Chicago Sun-Times report – called a “ridiculously biased story” with a “misleading headline” by former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas -- relied on prominent plaintiff’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean as a primary source to target Burke’s office. The attack centers around the exoneration petition of Tyrece Williams, convicted of a 1991 murder. An assistant state’s attorney advised a witness to the murder, Wilfredo Torres, who now claims he was beaten by a detective to identify Willaims as the murderer, retain counsel before testifying in Williams’ exoneration hearing.

On Monday, Bonjean, now Torres’s lawyer, told Cook County Judge Carol Howard she believed O’Neill Burke did so “to signal there is a new sheriff in town,” one, who according to the Sun-Times report, is “directing prosecutors to threaten the lawyer’s client with perjury to scare him and other potential witnesses from recanting testimony in police misconduct cases.”

State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke | Cook County

Last February, Williams, along with six others petitioned to have their convictions overturned. Retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara was the lead investigator in all the cases.

Torres was scheduled to testify back in December but Linda Walls, head of the Conviction Review Unit in the State’s Attorney’s office, advised him to get an attorney before testifying.

“I don’t know what that decision may or may not be should the Class 3 felony be committed under oath,” the Sun-Times reported Walls as saying in an earlier story. “But as an assistant state’s attorney, I cannot let a citizen commit a felony without having counsel.”

Contradicting Bonjean, Vallas posted on X that the advice from Walls “was an example of standard ethical practices by prosecutors.”

“Expect more of this type of media nonsense due to the real intimidation - lawyers who secured their fortunes suing police/government in the name of criminal justice reform, who previously had a State’s Attorney who settled most civil cases with giant, taxpayer funded settlements.”

Another X post from the author of the “Crooked City” column, Martin Preib, said of the Sun-Times story that “lying under oath is called perjury. Lying under the guise of ‘reporting’ is not technically a crime, but it is a violation of journalism ethics. Except in Chicago.”

In a follow-up editorial, the Sun-Times admitted that Walls made “fair points” when she questioned Torres’s credibility during cross-examination. Walls pointed out that “Torres had never told anyone that he had falsely identified Wiliams up until last year, and that he didn’t mention Guevara by name in a statement he signed with the Exoneration Project.”

When asked for a comment on the story, a spokesperson for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office said that it couldn’t comment on pending litigation.