Leroy Orange (born July 20, 1950, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American man, who on January 12, 1984, was arrested along with his half-brother, Leonard Kidd, for the murders of four people (Ricardo Pedro, 25, Michelle Jointer, 30, Renee Coleman, 27, and Coleman's 10-year-old son, Tony) at 1553 W 91st Street in Chicago's South Side Brainerd neighborhood based on false accusations by Kidd. Orange was convicted on the basis of a confession he gave after being tortured in Chicago's Area 2 police station under the direction of Commander Jon Burge. Orange confessed to a murder after police placed a plastic bag over his head and applied electric shocks to his testicles. Burge was thrown off the force in 1993 for directing the torture of scores of people in custody. [1] [2] [3]
Orange eventually confessed to the murders after twelve hours of interrogation and alleged torture at the hands of Chicago Police Lieutenant Jon Burge. [4] At trial, despite Kidd's testimony on the witness stand that he had acted alone, Orange was convicted. It would later be found that this was at least in part due to his defense attorney's failures to mount a robust defense. [5] [6]
After several appeals that were being forestalled on technicalities, the Bluhm Legal Clinic, led by Thomas F. Geraghty, entered the case.
On January 10, 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan granted Orange a full pardon based on innocence, criticizing prosecutors and the judiciary for relying on "procedural technicalities at the exclusion of the quest for truth". [7]
Leroy Orange was subsequently arrested for attempting to sell crack cocaine to an undercover police officer. [8]
George Homer Ryan is an American former politician who served as the 39th governor of Illinois from 1999 to 2003. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as secretary of State of Illinois from 1991 to 1999 and as lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1991. He was later convicted of federal racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax fraud stemming from his time in office.
The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is the primary law enforcement agency of the city of Chicago, Illinois, United States, under the jurisdiction of the Chicago City Council. It is the second-largest municipal police department in the United States, behind the New York City Police Department. As of 2022 CPD had 11,710 sworn officers on duty, and in 2020 had over 948 other employees. Tracing its roots to 1835, the Chicago Police Department is one of the oldest modern police departments in the world.
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.
Anthony Porter 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.
Jeffrey Mark Deskovic is an American attorney from Peekskill, New York known for freeing the wrongly convicted. In 1990, at the age of 17, he was convicted of raping, beating, and strangling his Peekskill High School classmate, Angela Correa, who was 15 at the time of the murder.
Jon Graham Burge was an American police detective and commander in the Chicago Police Department. He was found guilty of lying about "directly participat[ing] in or implicitly approv[ing] the torture" of at least 118 people in police custody in order to force false confessions.
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.
People's Law Office (PLO) is a law office in Chicago, Illinois, which focuses on public interest law, representing clients believed to have been the subject of attacks by governmental officials and agencies. It was founded in 1969. Clients have included political activists, people who have been wrongfully arrested and imprisoned, or subjected to excessive force; and criminal defendants.
The Dixmoor 5 are five African-American men who, as teenagers in Dixmoor, Illinois, were falsely convicted of the November 1991 rape and murder of 14-year-old Cateresa Matthews. At the time of arrest, the defendants, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, James Harden, Robert Lee Veal and Shainne Sharp were all between the ages of 14 and 16.
G. Flint Taylor is an American human rights and civil rights attorney based in Chicago, Illinois, who has litigated many high-profile police brutality, government misconduct and death penalty cases. Taylor has pursued public interest law to take on allegations of corrupt police tactics and wrongful convictions in the city of Chicago and elsewhere. Taylor was part of a team of negotiators in the 2015 landmark decision by the City of Chicago to award reparations to the survivors of police torture, becoming the first municipal government to do so.
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.
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.
Richard Patrick Zuley is a former homicide detective in the United States who had a 37-year career in the Chicago Police Department. He is most known for obtaining confessions from suspects by torture. Since the early 2000s, some of these convictions have been investigated and overturned as wrongful, following allegations that he had tortured and/or framed suspects. Since 2013 he has been the subject of several civil suits from inmates claiming abuse and frame-ups to gain convictions.
Lathierial Boyd is an African-American man from Chicago who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1990 and served 23 years in prison. His appeals were turned down. An investigation by WGN-TV television in 2001 helped document new evidence in his case.
Juan A. Rivera Jr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted three times for the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Illinois. He was convicted twice on the basis of a confession that he said was coerced. No physical evidence linked him to the crime scene. In 2015 he received a $20 million settlement from Lake County, Illinois for wrongful conviction, formerly the largest settlement of its kind in United States history.
Louis N. Scarcella is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who earned frequent commendations during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and 1990s, before many convictions resulting from his investigations were overturned during his retirement. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, leading to innocent parties serving long prison terms and guilty individuals going free.
Kimberly M. Foxx is an American politician, who is currently the State's Attorney for Cook County, Illinois. She manages the second largest prosecutor's office in the United States, consisting of approximately 700 attorneys and 1,100 employees. In 2016, she won the Democratic nomination for State's Attorney against incumbent Anita Alvarez and went on to win the general election. She was re-elected in 2020. In 2023, she announced that she would not run for re-election in 2024.
Mark Maxson is a formerly imprisoned convict, who was falsely accused and convicted of the murder of Lindsay Murdock, a six-year-old boy, and later exonerated by DNA evidence. Following the murder in August 1993, Maxson spent over two decades in prison before being released in September 2016.
Steven A. Drizin is an American lawyer and academic. He is a Clinical Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. At Northwestern, Drizin teaches courses on Wrongful Convictions and Juvenile Justice. He has written extensively on the topics of police interrogations and false confessions. Among the general public, Drizin is known for his ongoing representation of Brendan Dassey, one of the protagonists in the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.