Chicago-based Loevy & Loevy and other plaintiffs’ firms have been on a roll winning multi-million settlements for convicted murderers exonerated of their crimes.
The city has settled many of the cases – some dating back more than 30 years – in part because detectives who investigated the crimes were advised not to appear in court, or were unwilling to appear, to refute charges that they tortured suspects into confessing.
Retired homicide detective Kenneth Boudreau and his former partner, Jack Halloran, could change that.
Attorney Jon Loevy, of Loevy & Loevy
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Boudreau said both he and Halloran are determined to clear their names, and put an end to the settlements from a spate of exonerations over the past 10 years they say have arisen from political pressure and speculative media reports rather than findings of new evidence. By one estimate, the city has already shelled out $130 million in these cases.
“I have absolutely no problem revisiting cases where new evidence comes to light,” Boudreau told The Cook County Record in a recent interview. “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.
One upcoming trial in a case naming Boudreau and Halloran, Tyrone Hood v. City of Chicago, has its origins in the 1993 murder of college student and basketball star Marshall Morgan Jr.
Hood’s exoneration in 2015 was not based on a finding of new evidence, but rather on “an intense media” campaign, according to a motion filed in 2019 in the case by city attorneys. The campaign, the motion says, was orchestrated by Loevy & Loevy and the Exoneration Project (EP), an activist organization associated with Loevy & Loevy. Attorneys from Loevy & Loevycomprise most of the staff at EP, out of the University of Chicago. An allegedly sympathetic media played along with the narrative, the motion says.
According to EP’s executive director, the campaign on Hood’s behalf "was their biggest foray into really trying a dynamic way of trying a case outside the courts,” the motion noted.
Media reports pointed a finger away from Hood and his alleged partner in the crime, Wayne Washington, and at Morgan’s father. The reports, especially a 2014 story published in the New Yorker, titled "Crime Fiction," compelled former Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, to grant Hood clemency on the former governor's last day in office in 2015.
But the New Yorker article, the motion said, contained a “number of unsupported and easily debunked assertions about the sufficiency of the evidence and Morgan Sr.’s alleged modu operandi connection to his son’s death.”
Chief among them was the claim that Morgan bought a life insurance policy for his son just six months before his murder. Morgan actually took out an insurance policy eight years before the murder.
In addition, the motion notes that no new evidence is being presented to clear Hood and Washington of the crime.
“Plaintiffs now claim they are innocent of Morgan Jr.’s homicide, even though there is no exculpatory evidence exonerating them, and they never have been able to undermine, namely: Hood’s fingerprints found on items in the same car as Morgan Jr’s body; an eyewitness (Emanuel Bob) who observed Hood and Washington with the victim’s car after the victim’s disappearance; Washington’s own confession, which also implicates Hood; and Washington’s guilty plea,” the motion says.
The exonerations, and resultant civil cases, center around former Police Commander Jon Burge. Burge, who died in 2018, was found guilty in federal court in 2010 for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with testimony he gave in a civil case involving torture allegations. Boudreau and Halloran worked under Burge in the early 1990s.
Boudreau has been characterized in the media as a Burge protégé. But Boudreau notes he only worked under Burge for a few months, and had almost no contact with his former supervisor.
“We had 300 detectives in Area 3,” he said. “I was never even in an interview room with him.”
The detectives worked out of Area One on Chicago's South Side during the Morgan homicide investigation.
Boudreau also said that he never received a complaint about his work, only praise, from the start of his law enforcement career in suburban Palos Hills to his detective work in Chicago. At times, Boudreau worked with the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In addition, Cook County Circuit Court Judge William Hooks in a 2020 opinion, while reviewing a separate case in which a plaintiff alleged torture by Chicago Police, wrote that no evidence exists in that case or any others that Boudreau or Halloran ever abused any suspects.
Boudreau said the only complaints he ever received were from convicted murders.
“Unless you make a complaint against a cop, there is no case, and if there is no case, there is no payday,” he said.
The Tyrone Hood trial is expected to start in February.
Loevy & Loevy did not respond to a request for comment.