Anthony Porter (December 14, 1954 - July 25, 2021) was a Chicago resident known for having been exonerated in 1999 of the murder in 1982 of two teenagers on the South Side of the city. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983, and served 17 years on death row. He was exonerated following introduction of new evidence by Northwestern University professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism as part of their investigation for the school's Innocence Project. Porter's appeals had been repeatedly rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, and he was once 50 hours away from execution.[1]
Porter was exonerated after another suspect was identified and confessed, in a process since considered highly controversial. Alstory Simon, who was living in Chicago in the 1980s but had returned to Milwaukee, was identified in 1999 by the Medill Innocence Project as the perpetrator of the murders. Simon confessed to the crime on videotape. He pleaded guilty, was convicted in 1999, and sentenced to 37+1⁄2 years in prison. But Simon later recanted his confession, saying that he had been duped and it had been coerced by private investigator Paul Ciolino, who posed as a city police officer while working with the Innocence Project. David Protess, one of two professors involved with the Innocence Project, was suspended by Northwestern University in 2011 as a result of the controversy. Two witnesses also recanted their statements.[2]
After a yearlong investigation, the charges against Simon were vacated by the Cook County State's Attorney's office and he was freed in 2014, after having served 15 years in prison. The Chicago double-murder case is still unsolved.[2]
Anthony Porter filed a civil suit against the city, but a jury trial in 2005 found in favor of the city, the original police investigation, and prosecution. Alstory Simon filed suit in 2015 against Northwestern University's Innocence Project, and was awarded an undisclosed settlement in June 2018.
Porter died on June 25, 2021, of a likely drug overdose.
The crime
About 1 a.m. on August 15, 1982, two teenagers, Marilyn Green and her fiance Jerry Hillard, were shot and killed near a swimming pool in Washington Park on the south side of Chicago.
Anthony Porter, a 27-year-old gang member, was identified by several witnesses as being involved with the crime or near the crime scene. William Taylor, who had been swimming in the pool at the time of the shooting, initially said that he had not seen the shooting but had seen Porter run past shortly after the shots. He later said that he had seen Porter firing the shots. He was among six witnesses who identified Porter in the areas of the shooting, including one who said he had been robbed by Porter at gunpoint a short time earlier in the park.[3]
Police were given leads pointing toward other suspects.[3] They appeared to pursue only Porter. Upon hearing that he was under suspicion, Porter went to the police and turned himself in. He was immediately arrested and charged with the two murders, one count of armed robbery, one count of unlawful restraint, and two counts of unlawful use of weapons.
After a short trial, Porter was convicted of the murders. Judge Robert L. Sklodowski sentenced Porter to death, calling him a "perverse shark." An appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court was denied in February 1986, and an appeal to the United States Supreme Court was denied the following year. Porter continued to file appeals in the years that followed, delaying the execution.
In 1995 Porter's defense counsel arranged testing of his client's mental capacity. He was found to have an IQ of 51, characterizing him as intellectually disabled. His counsel filed a new appeal on the grounds that Porter was incapable of understanding his punishment by the death penalty. In late 1998, forty-eight hours before he was scheduled to be executed, the court granted another stay.
Northwestern University investigation
At that time, students in a journalism course taught by Northwestern University professor David Protess investigated the Anthony Porter case as part of a class assignment for the Innocence Project of the Medill School of Journalism (it is now called the Medill Justice Project.)[3] The students assigned to the Porter case gathered evidence through their investigation that exposed serious flaws in the prosecution.
Student Tom McCann and Private Investigator Paul J. Ciolino spoke to William Taylor who, in December 1998, recanted his original statements. He said that Chicago police had "threatened, harassed and intimidated" him into accusing Porter. But McCann and Ciolino did not speak to any other of the original six witnesses, nor to the detectives who investigated the case.
On January 29, 1999, Inez Jackson, the estranged wife of Alstory Simon, then living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was from, came forward to testify against him. He had lived in Chicago in the 1980s. She claimed that she had been with Simon when he killed Hilliard in retaliation for "skimming money from drug deals."[citation needed] She also said that she had never met or seen Porter. Her nephew Walter Jackson, whose apartment Simon allegedly fled to after the shooting, corroborated her story.
Simon was contacted at his home in Milwaukee by Ciolino and others associated with the Innocence Project. Four days later, on February 3, 1999, Simon went to the police and confessed to the crime in a videotaped session.[3] Protess and the students introduced information from their investigation.[citation needed]
After representatives of the Cook County State's Attorney office saw Simon's tape, it launched a new investigation into the Porter case.[4]
Two days later, Porter was released from prison on bail, after having spent 17years on death row. The state dropped the charges against him the next month.
In 1999 Alstory Simon was formally charged with the two murders. In September 1999, Simon pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 37½ years in prison.[5]
Recantation
In 2005, Inez Jackson and her nephew, Walter Jackson, both recanted their statements that implicated Simon in the crime. Inez Jackson was extremely ill and on her deathbed.[6] They admitted that they had fabricated their stories in order to obtain money and help from professor David Protess in order to free Inez's son, Sonny Jackson, and her nephew, Walter Jackson, from prison. When Walter Jackson had first become involved in the case, he was incarcerated for first-degree murder.[7]
Alstory Simon recanted his confession. He said that he had been pressured into making a false statement by Ciolino and another man. They posed as city police officers, and they showed him a videotape of an actor pretending to be a witness who implicated him in the crime. They promised him a short prison sentence and a movie deal if he confessed.[2][3][6]
Protess and Ciolino vigorously denied any wrongdoing; they said that a number of Simon's claims are false, and they believed that he was guilty of the murders.[7] In 2011, Northwestern University placed Protess on leave after finding that he had deliberately falsified evidence related to a subpoena issued by Cook County for his records in a different wrongful conviction case.[8] He resigned from the university and by 2014 had become head of the Chicago Innocence Project.[2]
Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez conducted a year-long investigation of Simon's case. She vacated the charges against him and ended his 37-year sentence in October 2014, ordering his release from prison. He had served for 15 years. The question of who committed the double murders is unanswered.[9] Alvarez said the investigation by the Medill Innocence Project "involved a series of alarming tactics that were not only coercive and absolutely unacceptable by law enforcement standards, they were potentially in violation of Mr. Simon's constitutionally protected rights."[2]
Civil cases
After his release, in 2003 Anthony Porter sued the City of Chicago for $24 million. The City refused settlement and the case went to trial in 2005. After additional investigation, the City's attorney argued that Porter had in fact committed the killings.[3] The jury found in favor of the City, thus the City was not liable for any damages, and Porter did not receive any settlement.[10]
Based on information revealed in Porter's suit, which detailed the work of the Innocence Project in gaining new material, Alstory Simon filed a post-conviction petition for relief January 2006 in his case.[11] He noted that Ciolino and others had deceived him when they contacted him, including having an actor pretend to be a witness against him in the case. Furthermore, Ciolino had recommended a defense counsel who was a professional colleague and associate, in a clear conflict of interest. As a result, Simon said he was denied due process and did not have adequate defense counsel.
After Simon was finally exonerated, in 2014 he filed a civil federal civil rights suit against the Northwestern University Innocence Project, saying people associated with it had deceived and coerced him into a false confession to the murders of Hilliard and Green, which resulted in his being convicted of murder and serving 15 years in prison. In November 2018, he received an undisclosed settlement.
Ramifications
State officials initially denied any wrongdoing in the Porter case. Chicago's Mayor Richard M. Daley, who had been Illinois State Attorney during the prosecution of Porter, asserted that "It was a thorough case, it was reviewed. No one railroads anyone."[citation needed] Illinois Governor George Ryan suggested that the exoneration of Porter was evidence that the system worked.[citation needed]
The Northwestern University Innocence Project had earlier assisted in the exoneration of four men on death row. More recently, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were found to have been wrongfully convicted after having been prosecuted by Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan for the 1983 rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. They were exonerated after having been sentenced to death.
Given these cases, in which several innocent men were found to have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, there was intense pressure from the public and the media to make a change. After ordering a review of the state's cases, in 2000 Governor Ryan initiated a moratorium on executions in Illinois. In 2011 the state legislature passed a law abolishing use of the death penalty in the state and Governor Pat Quinn signed it into law.[12]
Representation in other media
The documentary A Murder in the Park (2014) explored the campaign to free Anthony Porter. It concluded that the original conviction of Porter was sound, and that Alstory Simon was wrongfully convicted. The film argues that David Protess and his team conducted a partial and imperfect investigation of the Porter conviction. It suggests they were more concerned with undermining Illinois' use of the death penalty than with finding the truth of the murders.[13]
The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is a constituent school of Northwestern University that offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. It frequently ranks as the top school of journalism in the United States. Medill alumni include over 40 Pulitzer Prize laureates, numerous national correspondents for major networks, many well-known reporters, columnists and media executives.
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.
Exoneration occurs when the conviction for a crime is reversed, either through demonstration of innocence, a flaw in the conviction, or otherwise. Attempts to exonerate convicts are particularly controversial in death penalty cases, especially where new evidence is put forth after the execution has taken place. The transitive verb, "to exonerate" can also mean to informally absolve one from blame.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Joseph H. Burrows was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of farmer William E. Dulan at his home in Iroquois County, Illinois, in 1988. After his conviction and sentence to death in 1989, Burrows was held for nearly five years on death row.
Rolando Cruz is an American man known for having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, along with co-defendant Alejandro Hernandez, for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County, Illinois. The police had no substantive physical evidence linking the two men to the crime. Their first trial was jointly in 1987, and their statements were used against each other and a third defendant.
Anthony McKinney was a prisoner convicted of killing a security guard in 1978 in Harvey, Illinois. He was the subject of a Medill Innocence Project effort to reinvestigate his case and determine if he was wrongfully convicted. The case obtained notoriety after the Cook County state's attorney subpoenaed the Medill School of Journalism students' grades, class syllabus, and personal e-mails. This case is relevant to issues of Freedom of the Press because of the subpoena of journalism school class records as well as issues relating to possible wrongful conviction.
Delbert Lee Tibbs was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 in Florida and sentenced to death. Later exonerated, Tibbs became a writer and anti-death penalty activist.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.
Investigating Innocence is a nonprofit wrongful conviction advocacy organization that provides criminal defense investigations for inmates in the United States. Investigating Innocence was founded in 2013 by private investigator Bill Clutter to assist nationwide Innocence Project groups in investigating innocence claims. "Once we have a case that meets our criteria, we'll put private investigators to work on it. A lot of these cases need investigators," said Kelly Thompson, executive director of Investigating Innocence. Prior to his work on Investigating Innocence, Clutter was one of the founders of the Illinois Innocence Project. Investigating Innocence also has a board composed of exonerees that reviews incoming cases.
Ricky Jackson, Ronnie Bridgeman and Wiley Bridgeman are African Americans who were wrongfully convicted of murder as young men in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1975 and sentenced to death. Their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 1977. They were imprisoned for decades before each of the three was exonerated in late 2014. Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were released that year.
The Ford Heights Four were formerly imprisoned convicts, who were falsely accused and convicted of the double murder of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal in Ford Heights, Illinois, and later exonerated. Jimerson and Williams were sentenced to death, Adams to 75 years in prison and Rainge to life. Following the murder in 1978, the four spent almost two decades in prison before being released in 1996. This miscarriage of justice was due to false forensic testimony, coercion of a prosecution witness, perjury by another witness who had an incentive to lie, and prosecution and police misconduct. The DNA evidence uncovered in the investigation to clear their names eventually led to the arrest and conviction of the real killers.
A Murder in the Park is a 2014 American true crime documentary directed by Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber.
Bill Clutter is an American private investigator, wrongful conviction advocate, and author. He is the co-founder of the Illinois Innocence Project and founder of the national wrongful conviction organization Investigating Innocence. His work on the Donaldson v. Central Illinois Public Service Company case led him to write the book Coal Tar: How Corrupt Politics and Corporate Greed Are Killing America's Children, which is the story of an epidemic of neuroblastoma in Taylorville, IL caused by exposure to coal tar.
Kevin Strickland is an African-American man who was wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury in 1979 of killing three people in Kansas City, Missouri. No physical evidence linked him to the scene of the crime and the only alleged witness later recanted her testimony that Strickland was involved. Strickland was given a life sentence. In 2021, he garnered national attention after former prosecutors in his case said that he was very likely innocent and called for his release.
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