Chicago City Wire

A federal judge has ordered city attorneys to produce detective “street files” of homicides from 1989 to 1996 in the wrongful conviction lawsuits of brothers Reginald Henderson and Sean Tyler, convicted of the 1994 murder of ten-year-old Rodney Collins.

U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis also ordered the attorneys to produce files of officer complaints, or CR files, from separate wrongful conviction lawsuits filed by Wayne Washington and Tyrone Hood, convicted of the 1993 murder of college basketball star Marshall Morgan, Jr.

Street files are old case reports and notes from detectives investigating the homicides. One former city detective told Chicago City Wire the files have been embellished by the press as "secret files" containing exculpatory evidence.

City attorneys resisted the motion to produce the files arguing in part that producing them would be too burdensome and, that together with the CR files, lawyers for Henderson and Tyler were trying to draw the specter of former Commander Jon Burge into the case. 

Burge was fired in 1993 over allegations that he tortured suspects.

“Their Complaints target Burge’s alleged connection with Defendant Officers with completely unsubstantiated allegations that the officers electroshocked suspects as Burge was found to have done,” city lawyers argued, “and their disclosures are virtually identical to the Burge-era documents relied on in Hood/Washington, extending far beyond ostensibly providing ‘notice of the City’s alleged ‘coerced confession’ practice.”

Henderson and Tyler lawyers argued in a March 17 motion in that “the City has offered no legitimate basis for not re-using the Hood C.R. files, and it appears that the real reason they want to try to limit Plaintiffs to a shorter window is to try to cut Jon Burge out of discovery. But Burge is undoubtedly relevant to at least one of the elements of Plaintiffs’ Monell claim—notice to the city of the problem of using coerced and fabricated evidence—and the city cannot bar any inquiry into Burge by inventing an arbitrary cutoff for discovery.”

Some of the detectives named in the original complaints filed in July 2023, including now retired Detective Kenneth Boudreau, were under Burge’s supervision for a brief time.

The Tyler and Henderson civil complaints tell of an elaborate scheme, citing Boudreau and former Detective James O’Brien, to frame the brothers as part of a vendetta stemming from Tyler’s testimony for the defense in a separate shooting case.

But Boudreau told Chicago City Wire for an earlier story that he had minimal involvement in the case. Moreover, he served under Burge’s command for only a few months and had few encounters with him.

For their parts, Washington and Hood in June received a $25 million settlement in their wrongful conviction cases stemming from the Morgan murder.

The case in federal court was expected to go to trial sometime last summer with Boudreau saying that he and his former partner Jack Halloran were willing to testify that they did not force Hood and Washington, as the two alleged, to confess to a crime they did not commit.

Both detectives have been named in other wrongful conviction cases, but insist they did nothing wrong in their investigations.

“I have absolutely no problem revisiting cases where new evidence comes to light,” Boudreau told the Cook County Record. “Those cases deserve another look. But not cases based on the media or politics, where witnesses from 30 years ago recant testimony, don’t want to testify again or aren’t around to testify.”

“As God as my witness, we did nothing wrong,” he added.