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Man released from prison after controversial conviction is dismissed
By Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune reporter
June 29, 2013
The evidence on which Daniel Taylor pinned his hopes for someday being released from prison never really changed — police records showing that he was in a Chicago police lockup when a brutal double murder occurred in November 1992.
But over the more than two decades since his arrest, Taylor experienced setback after setback. In spite of his powerful evidence, he was taken to trial, convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. He saw his appeals routinely turned back by various courts.
What's more, he was repeatedly rebuffed by Cook County prosecutors who put more stock in his lengthy confession than they did in the police records — and even the testimony of police officers.
It seemed, Taylor said, that nothing would win him back his freedom.
But then during a brief court hearing Friday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, a Cook County prosecutor announced that the office was finally dismissing Taylor's conviction. Hours later, he was freed from Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois.
The Tribune first brought the controversial case to light in 2001 as part of an investigation into false confessions. In the dozen years since then, Taylor's plight has remained an example to some of the difficulty in persuading prosecutors to reverse course when DNA evidence isn't at issue.
In his only interview Friday after his release from Menard, Taylor told the Tribune he was lifting weights when he was called in from the yard by guards. Told to see a counselor, Taylor, who didn't even know of the last-minute court hearing in Chicago, feared he was about to be given bad news
Learning of his newfound freedom set in motion a whirlwind for several hours for Taylor. He was allowed to say goodbye to his friends, including a co-defendant who, he said, began to weep.
Taylor left most of his belongings behind, but he made sure to give away his books — to inmates he believed would read them and not just use them for show in their cells.
He walked out of the maximum-security prison into a hot and sunny late afternoon with $41 in his pocket — into the embrace of his brother, his brother's fiancee as well as a mother whom he had not seen since his trial in 1995.
After exchanging hugs and kisses, a prison official told Taylor and his family that they had to leave the parking lot.
"Like I wanted to stay on the property," he said, laughing.
Taylor swapped shoes with his brother, David, donning the Nikes even though they were too small. The brothers joked about the gray in Taylor's neatly trimmed beard.
While prison was frustrating and he sometimes tired of having to show an angry face to other inmates, Taylor said he knew his fight for freedom would be lengthy and never considered giving up.
"I knew they wouldn't do the right thing immediately," he said as he later sat down to eat a chicken sandwich for dinner. "It would be an understatement to say I'm angry about it. But it's an anger that's in check and understood."
With Taylor's seemingly strong alibi, the question remained why it took so long for the Cook County state's attorney's office to dismiss the conviction.
In a statement, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said her decision followed a detailed review by her conviction integrity unit and her judgment that Taylor's release was in "the interest of justice."
But several factors could have played a role in the drawn-out process for a case that spanned the tenure of three elected state's attorneys: Jack O'Malley, whose office tried the case, and successors Dick Devine and Alvarez, both of whom — until Friday — aggressively fought to preserve the conviction.
As David Erickson, a former Illinois Appellate Court judge and onetime high-ranking prosecutor, noted Friday, the criminal justice system just "moves slow."
Taylor's case also lacked DNA evidence, often the impetus for courts to reverse convictions or for prosecutors to abandon them. It also featured confessions by Taylor and all seven of his co-defendants. Each implicated one another.
That one of Taylor's co-defendants has admitted his guilt could also have been a factor in the delays.
But it might have been as simple as that the prosecutors faced a July 19 deadline to respond to Taylor's latest request for a new trial and were weary of the bad publicity the case brought. After warning the opposing side late Thursday to be in court, prosecutors made their announcement on the morning that Chicago was celebrating the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup victory.
"There was no reason justice should have been delayed this long," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions, which represented Taylor. "This case should have been an easy one. Frankly, it never should have been brought."
Taylor was 17 when he and seven other young men were arrested in December 1992 for the murders a month earlier of Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook in their apartment not far from Clarendon Park on the city's North Side. Police and prosecutors alleged that four men acted as lookouts while four others killed the couple about 8:45 p.m..
But after Taylor confessed, he told detectives that he thought he had been arrested on the night of the murders. Police records indeed showed that he was arrested for disorderly conduct near Clarendon Park at 6:45 p.m. Reports showed he bonded out at 9:45 p.m. The detectives began trying to shore up the case.
Dennis Mixon, the last of the eight who was arrested, said in his confession that Taylor told him before the slayings that he had just been released from the lockup, a fact not in any of the other confessions. Police later filed a report claiming to have seen Taylor on the street, although that report was later undermined by key inconsistencies.
Taylor was convicted by a jury that sided with prosecutors Thomas Needham and Jeanne Bischoff, who argued that the confession was more credible than police records supporting Taylor's alibi.
The Tribune investigated Taylor's case in its 2001 series "Cops and Confessions" and found additional evidence supporting Taylor's innocence. That investigation prompted Devine to reinvestigate the case, but he concluded that the conviction was sound.
Records obtained just last year by the Tribune showed that Devine's investigation made little attempt to confirm Taylor's alibi, instead searching mostly for evidence of his guilt. In addition, Devine announced he was certain of Taylor's guilt after the office had completed fewer than two-thirds of the interviews that ultimately were conducted.
The Tribune continued to uncover evidence supporting his seemingly solid alibi. A new witness said Taylor was not among the men who fled the scene after the shooting, but that witness implicated Mixon.
Mixon told the Tribune that Taylor and the other six co-defendants were not involved in the slayings. He said he knew that because he took part in the couple's murder. He even named another accomplice.
Records turned over to Taylor's lead attorney, Karen Daniel, also buttressed his innocence claim. And last year, the Illinois attorney general's office discovered after reviewing the case that the state's attorney's office had withheld information damaging to its case from Taylor's lawyers, a contention disputed by prosecutors.
At every turn, lawyers for Taylor were told his confession was potent evidence of his guilt. Yet the justice system's understanding of how frail confessions can be, especially those obtained from teenagers and younger children, has advanced dramatically since Taylor's arrest.
"Years ago there was just so much less understanding of confessions," said Judy Royal, another of Taylor's lawyers
Still, she said, the defense team had amassed equally if not more powerful evidence to show that Taylor's confession, while detailed, was at odds with the police documents.
"There was no way you could have confidence in Daniel's confession," she said.
In the end, it appears that prosecutors came to the same conclusion. A source in the state's attorney's office said prosecutors came to believe more strongly in evidence that backed Taylor's alibi.
Taylor's release marks the fourth by the conviction integrity unit since its inception early last year, according to Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for the office. Warden, of the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions, said Taylor's exoneration marks the 90th in Cook County since 1989 — and the 34th featuring a tainted confession.
As Taylor sat down to his first supper outside prison walls in two decades, he said he hoped to get an education and "become acclimated" to the outside world, a world he knew had changed dramatically. He said he knew he was in for another long struggle, though this one he was eager to begin.
"My eyes are registering freedom," he said, "but inside my body still feels the prison tension."
Fuck you.
_________________ The Hawk wrote: There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.
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