Racism Emerging in Chicago’s Anti-Police Movement?

Is race playing a factor in the left’s war on the Chicago Police?

It has been a long and stubborn claim by anti-police activists and their journalism lapdogs that systemic racism pervades the Chicago Police Department. The most powerful allegations emerge in the left’s treasured exoneration movement, the one either claiming or implying convicted killers have been framed by officers because of racial animus.

These claims have not only released offenders from prison, but they have laid the foundation for a host of policies and legislation, including a consent decree born from an investigation of the police by President Obama’s Department of Justice.

However, now a collection of controversial cases in which attorneys and their supporters are claiming a once-convicted killer is innocent based on the theory that the crime was committed by another offender begs some deeply troubling questions about the bias in the exoneration movement. The reason is these claims have been attacked in several instances as completely false. The critics are saying that the alternate suspects are innocent and, in many of these cases, the alternate suspects are African American.

Therefore, if the minority alternate suspects played no role in the crime as many critics and city attorneys now allege, then what does that say about the chronic racism allegations against the police? If these alternate suspects are innocent, who then is putting false cases on African American men? If the alternate suspects are actually innocent, how would that exoneration be deemed as defending the rights of minorities? Wouldn’t it be just the opposite? Is this not a form of exploitation of African American men?

These questions become more crucial as what might be deemed a pattern of suspicious alternate suspect theories have taken shape in the federal courts, among elected officials, and in the media.  

Let’s take a look at them.

City attorneys representing retired detectives in a federal lawsuit are rejecting the alternate suspect theory in the murder case against Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington, both of whom were convicted for the murder of Marshall Morgan Jr. in 1993. Court documents reveal the city attorneys are assailing the claims and methods used by attorneys with the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago, who have pushed the theory that the murder of Marshall Morgan Jr. was in fact was actually committed by Morgan’s father, Marshall Morgan Sr.

Attorneys representing Chicago have pointed out in court motions that the theory against Marshall Sr. has already been rejected during the criminal trial of Hood and Washington. Chicago’s attorneys have also asserted that no new evidence has arisen to vindicate either Hood or Washington.

Instead, the city attorneys are alleging a disturbing strategy among the media, the Exoneration Project, and former governor Pat Quinn, who, the city attorneys claim, used media pressure, not evidence, in a court proceeding to obtain Washington and Hood’s release from prison.

Responding to the federal civil case brought by Hood and Washington, attorneys for Chicago have stated:

“Plaintiffs’ “exonerations” were not the result of a judicial finding or the discovery of exonerating evidence. Rather, knowing the Morgan Sr. theory had been unsuccessful in every judicial venue in which it had been presented, Hood’s attorneys at the Exoneration Project (EP) opted for a coordinated and misleading media campaign to try Hood’s case outside of the courts.”

“The EP relied on local and national media contacts, including a former NBC5 reporter, other “friendly reporters,” a social media presence, and celebrities to generate sympathetic publicity for Hood and to pressure public officials. The cornerstone of this campaign was a 2014 feature-length story in The New Yorker, which advocated on Hood’s behalf.”

“The New Yorker story was an important exhibit to, and was the primary source of information in, Hood’s clemency petition to then-Governor Pat Quinn. In 2015, on his last day in office, and only two months after receiving Hood’s clemency petition, former Gov. Quinn commuted Hood’s sentence to time served. Prior to the grant of clemency for Hood, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office had aggressively opposed Hood’s years-long post-conviction petition for a new trial (which had advanced to a stage-three evidentiary hearing on only one claim that prosecutors had failed to disclose relocation expenses given to a witness). No court has ever agreed with any of Hood’s other arguments. And to this day, there is no newly discovered forensic evidence (e.g., DNA) and no new eyewitness testimony that excludes Plaintiffs from the crime.”

Two factors weigh heavily in favor of the city attorneys’ allegations. Survey the wasteland of the Chicago media and you will find no coverage of these bombshell claims in federal court and no attention to the fact a governor is now credibly accused of freeing two killers on nothing more than biased media pressure.

The other factor is the fact that several of the defendants in this case, including retired detectives Jack Halloran, Kenneth Boudreau, and James O’Brien, have been under relentless attack by the media for decades, particularly by the Chicago Tribune. These detectives have maintained their innocence in coercing confessions time and again, in case after case. The accusations against these detectives always receive intense coverage by the media. Yet the very same media that attacks them so much ignores these allegations that they are being set up.

The churlish intransigence of media’s silence is both revealing and damning.

The Hood/Washington case is not the first in which an alternate suspect was drudged up in an attempt to vindicate a convicted killer.

In 2014, Alstory Simon was released from prison after his attorneys and supporters alleged he had been framed for a 1982 double murder in which another man, Anthony Porter, had been sent to death row.

Yet immediately after Porter was released from prison and Simon took his place, Simon began claiming he was coerced by the Northwestern investigators into confessing to the murders. His attorneys and supporters pressed then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to review the investigation by Northwestern Medill School of Journalism professor David Protess and his students, as well as private investigator Paul Ciolino, all of whom pushed the theory that Porter was innocent and Simon guilty.

Alvarez did review the case, and in 2014 she asked a judge to vacate Simon’s conviction. Simon walked free. Alvarez did not claim Simon was innocent, but she assailed the conduct of Protess and Ciolino in a press conference in announcing he would be set free.

From the Chicago Tribune:

“The bottom line is the investigation conducted by Protess and private investigator Ciolino as well as the subsequent legal representation of Mr. Simon were so flawed that it’s clear the constitutional rights of Mr. Simon were not scrupulously protected as our law requires,” said Alvarez, who indicated she would have considered obstruction of justice or witness intimidation charges if the statute of limitations hadn’t run out.”

An alternate suspect theory was also floated by supporters of Madison Hobley, who had been convicted of committing an arson in 1982 that killed seven people, including his own child and wife. Sentenced to death for the crime, supporters of Hobley put the spotlight of culpability on a tow truck driver, despite the fact that Hobley had confessed to the crime. This tow truck driver was actually a key witness in the case; he said he saw Hobley approach on foot at a nearby gas station where the driver often hung out and worked. The tow-truck driver stated he witnessed Hobley fill a gas can and then walk back in the direction where the fire was set.

Incredibly, the tow truck driver’s account to police mirrored Hobley’s confession in detail, a fact that makes the alternate suspect theory in this case almost laughable.

Hobley walked out of death row in 2003, along with three other convicted killers, not by virtue of exculpatory evidence but on the whim of Governor George Ryan, who shortly thereafter would go to prison on corruption charges.

In all these cases, the alternate suspects floated by the exoneration supporters are African American. Alstory Simon spent 16 years in prison. If these men are all truly innocent of the allegations that they are the offenders, what does it say about those who are promulgating their culpability? If they are innocent, what does it say about letting real offenders out of prison and returning them to the street?

Anthony Porter, after all, the man who walked out of death row for a double murder when Alstory Simon took his place, can be seen hanging out at a gas station on the South Side. What’s he up to?

Consider the racial demographics. The “journalists” who give voice to the alternate theory claims in these cases and others are overwhelmingly white: Jason Meisner, Dan Hinkel, Megan Crepeau, Eric Zorn, Jeremy Gorner, Sam Charles, Fran Spielman, Jon Seidel—all “journalists” or columnists who have historically pushed exoneration narratives or have ignored allegations that these claims are false.

So, too, are the civil rights law firms that push exoneration claims, including alternate suspect theories. In fact, neither the media covering these cases nor the law firms and law schools are nearly as diverse as the Chicago Police Department.

And as the evidence grows that many exoneration claims are complete hogwash and that many individuals being fingered as alternate suspects are deeply suspicious, the onus of bias shifts from the police to the anti-police movement.

Sorting out this bias, that might be the real social justice.

Martin Preib is a Chicago Police Officer and writer. His first book, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, was published by the University of Chicago Press. His other books, Crooked City and Burn Patterns, are available on Amazon. His articles have appeared in Playboy, The Chicagoan, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and New City.