A federal judge has ordered one of the police defendants named in the wrongful conviction lawsuit of Jose Cruz, convicted of a 1993 murder, to provide a handwriting sample for an analysis by an expert chosen by Cruz’s legal team.
Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois signed the order on Feb. 5.
One of Cruz’s allegations in his wrongful conviction suit, filed in July 2023, is that Detective Anthony Wojcik altered the police report to show that a witness, Vernon Meadors, to the shooting death of 16-year-old Antwane Douglas described the shooter as Black, not Hispanic.
Jose Cruz
| YouTube
Attorneys for the defendants, including retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara who has been named in other wrongful conviction suits, have maintained that the officers neither fabricated the General Offense Case Report (GOCR) nor pressured witnesses to falsely testify that Cruz was the shooter, as Cruz alleged in his complaint.
Based on his claims, Cruz was exonerated by former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in 2022 after a controversial visit with him while he was serving a 90-year sentence in Stateville Correctional Center. Foxx told Cruz at the time that he would soon go free.
In his order, Judge Fuentes wrote that “although Wojcik has denied that he wrote anywhere on the document, Cruz believes he can prove that to be false, and he has retained a handwriting expert to do a handwriting comparison. It is that expert who has prepared the exemplar template that Cruz needs Wojcik to complete.”
The judge also noted “Defense Officers primarily argue that they see as pure, ‘wild’ speculation the Plaintiff’s theory that the Wojcik exemplar discovery is relevant to Plaintiff’s claim, based on his theory that a witness (Vernon Meadors) initially told Chicago police that the persons involved in the murder for which Plaintiff later was convicted were ‘Black’ (characterized in police vernacular as the number ‘1’) so that the aforementioned GOCR police report document denoting the offenders’ race as Hispanic (with that vernacular being ‘4’) must have been altered so that the ‘1’ was changed to a ‘4.’
He continued that the “Officer Defendants also argue that the notion of Wojcik changing a ‘1’ to a ‘4’ on the report is too far-fetched to be real, considering how such an alteration could have been carried out, as a practical matter.”
Lawyers for the defendant officers, the judge noted, also point out that Meadors, injured in the 1993 shooting, never retracted his claim that the shooter was Cruz. Meadors died in 2020.
In the Cruz case, Foxx may have violated a Supreme Court rule covering communications with another attorney’s client when she discussed the case with Cruz at Stateville.
Supreme Court rule 4.2 states: “In representing a client, a lawyer shall not communicate about the subject of the representation with a person the lawyer knows to be represented by another lawyer in the matter, unless the lawyer has the consent of the other lawyer or is authorized to do so by law or a court order."
Cruz was one of more than 250 exonerated in Foxx's eight years in office.
In November, Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke defeated Republican Bob Fioretti and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski in the General Election for Cook County State's Attorney.
Alerts Sign-up