The Conviction Integrity Unit Under Eileen O’Neill Burke: A New Direction, Fewer Exonerations?

Cold Open: 00:00 When Kevin was released in 2024, it wasn’t luck that got him out. It was his resilience and the work of his legal team that exposed a possible conflict of interest and compelled the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to launch an extensive reinvestigation. The result? A sweeping 76-page report that dismantled the original conviction and raised major questions about its integrity. The first district appellate court said any reasonable review of the case would determine these convictions resulted solely from coerced and false statements.

Host: 00:52 Today, we are focusing on Cook County, Illinois. Cook County is the county that oversets Chicago. The Cook County State’s Attorney is the prosecutors in Cook County, one of the largest offices in the country. About 21 months ago, Eileen O’Neill Burke was elected Cook County State’s Attorney. Since that time, her conviction integrity unit has exonerated almost no one. The exonerations that have come about out of her office have all been in the early days, which are ones that started under her predecessor. Predecessors altogether have exonerated 480 people. Kim Fox, her immediate predecessor, 250 people. O’Neill Burke seems to be impervious to the CPD’s history, long and sorted as it is. We’ll be sorting all of this out with Injustice Watch senior reporter Dan Hinkle, who’s done some really fantastic reporting on this issue. Let’s get to the discussion. I’ll be back with you after. Dan Hinkle, thank you so much for jumping in on our pod with us. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So can you do us a favor? Let’s start at the start, which is what is it, the conviction integrity unit, and when was it set up in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office? Now we’re going way back.

Dan HInkel: 02:13 I think that if I’m remembering my own reporting correctly, I believe it was under Anita Alvarez around the time there were a few different scandals that you might recall relating to her treatment of people who claimed wrongful conviction. She there had been a uh CBS 60 minutes interview where she defended a particular case, which I think was broadly regarded as not very flattering to her office. And around that time, the conviction integrity unit started up, and it was like the records from the state’s attorney’s office are not super clear as to what how defined a role it had, or like where its tasks began and the tasks of others in the office began. But suffice to say that it eventually, when it passed into the hands of Kim Fox, that she had made a commitment to to reinvigorating it and making it more robust, basically.

Host: 03:08 So in your reporting, you you state that the unit has, when you compare it to ones around the country, the most exonerations nationwide, right? Out of the nation. Can you put that in some context? Because I think people who are listening who aren’t from Chicago and don’t necessarily know the history of the Chicago police department would think, wow, that’s an amazing thing. unknown: 03:35 Yeah.

Dan HInkel: 03:36 Yeah, there’s a lot of context required to completely understand that, which is that A, I as I’m sure the one people who had taken this podcast now, the CPD has a pretty disastrous history over the last several decades with wrongful convictions that stems from a history of torture, torture, everything from torture to error, you know, like things that are names like John Burge and right now the Guevara obviously mean something to people, but to the those who know less about it, it’s the the uh the CPD has long had an issue with violently abusive police, particular Burge being the most famous one. And what that has led to is that the Cook County is the nation’s leader in wrongful convictions. A lot of these I think that there’s something like at this point, they’re maybe sitting at something like 500, I believe, which is substantially more than other jurisdictions. The yeah, and there’s the Cook County Prosecutor’s Office, obviously, has played a substantial role in that as well, because somebody had to prosecute those Burge cases, right? And I don’t mean to make it sound like Burge was the entirety of the problem, but he was a very significant figure in it, and that things have never really slowed down at all. The conviction integrity to understand the conviction integrity unit’s record, it’s important to understand that the very wide majority of the exonerations done by the the CIU are cases related to a guy called Ronald Watts, who was a former police sergeant who, with another, at least one other cop, terrorized a housing project and was very often accused of planting drugs on people, guns, stuff like that. So a lot of what the CIU did, and this is out in the open that Kim Fox did not hide this, a very large amount of the reputation of the CIU is rooted in throwing out those cases, basically, which there’s two perspectives on this. Attorneys would characterize as okay, that’s low-hanging fruit. The cop went to federal prison, right? Like, how much could that matter? And when I talked to Kim Fox, what she said was if it was such low-hanging fruit, why didn’t somebody else pick it, right? Well, why was it left to me to dispense with these cases? Which take that as you will.

Host: 06:00 So this unit, traditionally, across from Alvarez to Fox and now O’Neill Burke, is staffed by career prosecutors and not outside federal prosecutors, federal public defenders, who may not necessarily have a connection to any of the previous cases, and a good chance of not having deep connections to anyone involved in these cases. Why do you think that wasn’t done and it was always kept within like to staff, but it was always kept within the confines of the office itself? That’s a good question.

Dan HInkel: 06:37 And it wasn’t it was not always that way. That for a couple of years it was led by this gentleman, Mark Rodert, who was a pretty well-regarded criminal defense lawyer. He had been both a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. But yes, by and large, it has been by and for prosecutors. And I think that I know that people will say that it’s it would be very challenging to get it’s tough to get people to take on that task, right? To come into the prosecutor’s office when they are not prosecutors. And I I I’m not sure whether I don’t know a ton about the logistical challenges of whether that would have been doable beyond Mark Roder or not. I do know that just generally it’s not a best practice that if you talk to folks, academics who study this stuff, or the folks who are initially behind the push to have CIUs, the sort of berry checks of the world, what they’ll tell you is that you got to have an outside perspective on this, because if you don’t have an outside perspective, it’s gonna be much, much more likely that you’re gonna get people who are just committed to the cause, right? That are that are gonna have a really hard time undoing the convictions that their own colleagues made, right? And we may get into this further, but one problem that having career prosecutors in there created was that, yeah, it created these conflicts, like specific conflicts cases where they the CIU would say X person has been recused, but it’s a three, four, five, six-person unit, and you still might end up working on a case that your boss like built, right? Or someone who you’re close friends with built. And obviously, people on the other sides of these cases viewed that as a pretty significant problem. And the most famous conflict that has ever existed in the the history of the CIU has turned out to be big news, was the that the there was a prosecutor in there, Pearson Ann Olson, who was married to a Chicago police officer by the name of Brian Forberg. Forberg, if you could Google it, he has many, many allegations from defendants saying that he coerced either them or the witnesses in their cases, into the statements that their cases were founded on. And there was a very particular case in the Kakani CIU, a gentleman by the name of Kevin Jackson, who did 23 years in prison for murder. And at a certain point, it came out that the CIU that had been responsible for that had rejected him twice, had included this prosecutor who was married to the police officer who built his case. Now, the CIU officials said she had recused herself. Obviously, that was not didn’t really satisfy people who were representing Kevin Jackson, who is now free and seeking a certificate of innocence.

Host: 09:29 So very Chicago, right? I think in the Burge cases, they uh took them forever to get some of appeals through, and then there were some appeals that ended up having judges review them and deny them, where they were actually the prosecutor and the felony review and took the confession off the guy. So it’s just the way things work here. So I want to right, I want to give you a name. This woman seems somewhat the living embodiment for why you need the woman you just mentioned, but here’s another one about why you need outside staff possibly to run these offices. Nancy, and I’m gonna mispronounce her name, but I’m gonna call it a Ducci.

Dan HInkel: 10:07 I think I I say it a Ducy, I’m not sure.

Host: 10:10 Okay. Can you tell us about her conflicts or what she did to make it into your wonder, by the way, fantastic recording.

Dan HInkel: 10:21 I really appreciate it. Yeah, and Nancy led the CIU for a couple years. She was a career prosecutor. She was running the CIU when it rejected that guy, Kevin Jackson. Yeah, eventually, and this was if you want to know a lot about what happened and how Nancy Aducy came to leave the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, that’s reporting that was done by other wonderful reporters in this town. So I would advise looking that up because it was interesting. She herself had another conflict with a gentleman by the name of Carl Reed, in that she had handwritten his confession, which is a thing that you will sometimes see in these criminal cases. The prosecutor has a lot to has something to do with coming in at the end of the interrogation or whatever. One of the other detectives who interrogated, or a detective who interrogated this guy, Carl Reed, was Richard Zully, who is another name you would know, at least in Chicago. Another guy who’s been subject to a lot of allegations. He was a US Navy interrogator who was known for interrogating detainees at Guatanamo Bay. So Aducy had testified that Carl Reed didn’t complain about and about having any abuse forced on him. She said he seemed literate and able to make the confession. And when Carl Reed’s lawyers went to the CIU in 2017, she was the supervisor, right? She was said to have been recused. But once again, of course, her attorneys are like, still your boss, who in this was a little bit of a special case because it’s not like she was passingly involved in this in some way, or it’s not like she has some relationship to somebody. She hand wrote this man’s confession. And so the I think re reasonably uh that raised some questions, and they rejected Carrie, and then J.Britzger eventually commuted his sentence with the support of Kim Fox’s office. He went free.

Host: 12:12 Well, the complications here are mind-boggling. So let’s get back a little bit earlier in the interview. You talked about Fox in your article, and I’m sure it’s from her claiming that she had exonerated her office, had exonerated 248 people. But as you said, 226 were connected to Watts. So that leaves 22 outside of the Watts case over eight years. Is it fair when you’re reviewing and trying to evaluate Fox’s commitment to this and the work that the unit did during her time? Is it fair to pull out the Watts cases and judge her independently of that? I don’t I’m asking mainly because I’m trying to get my head wrapped around it. Yeah, because the 248 sounds amazing, and then but you’re like, oh wait, there was this horribly corrupted, brutal cop that who, by the way, also went to federal prison. So I kind of see the low-hanging fruit argument.

Dan HInkel: 13:18 Yeah, but yeah, I think it really, and this is a thing, obviously, my editors and I struggled with is how to how to think about this and how to situate it for our readers. Because I think it’s important. It is, of course, the CIU could not have done that many cases if they were the way that there came to be that many cases of people that were thrown out was that they were you look at them and they were of a piece with one another, right? These things are labor intensive, and the the Watts cases are a little bit different, and that obviously allowed for dozens and dozens to be disposed of sometimes at one time. But Kim Fox is absolutely correct when she says nobody else did this. Whatever your standard is, like you’re people are free to decide what standard they’re holding any given state’s attorney to, right? What their personal politics and priorities might be. She’s correct, however, that you’re free to call it low-hanging fruit, but it just she was the only one willing to do it who’s ever held the office. And but the the context of it is that if you remove those, the CIU’s record looks fairly typical, right? It’s pretty well in line with other as in a lot of things. The things the thing that catches people’s attention is the PR, right? That it’s that uh the office is talking about this a lot. They’re saying, hey, the CIU did this, the CIU did that, the CIU did this, and the CIU did that. And to be very frank with you, that’s how I started down this road. It’s because I’d heard all about it, but I didn’t think that anybody had ever really put the numbers against it and figured out what is this thing really done, what’s its track record for real. And so I think that very often the thing that raises the attention of an investigative reporter is when something is talked about as a great success. And then I think it’s an invitation to figure out if that’s true or not. And so, yeah, I think it’s a really complicated story. It’s a really and everyone has to figure out for themselves what to think about what standard prosecutors are held to in terms of throwing out their own cases, undoing their own work, alienating themselves from their colleagues. What what standard do you hold prosecutors to? And that’s something every reader is gonna have to answer on their own.

Host: 15:34 I know there’s it would be very hard for any individual to undo a case their boss took the confession in. Let’s just start there as a baseline. So I know in your recording, you guys, I believe are still in court against the state’s attorney’s office or were in court against them. So what what access, what problems did you have accessing records related to this unit’s work? And was that access limited both by Fox and O’Neill Burke?

Dan HInkel: 16:09 That’s a great question. Our FOIA is, I believe we had trouble getting so I’ll take you back. Originally, we got really nice records, like not complete, but really nice records of the CIU’s actions. I think we had filed that FOIA around 2022 or 2023. I think my actual, in fact, my editor filed it before I even got to Injustice Watch. And then I picked that up and added some of my own Freedom of Information Act work and stuff like that. At a certain point, I believe it was under Kim Fox, they stopped giving us versions of that record, right? We stopped having access to that. And at a certain point, I definitely understand, I recall that there was a FOIA turned down under BERT that we are we continue to be in court trying to get access to that. And the the the thing about this, I’d love to explain it to your viewers like exactly why this matters, and exactly because I feel like sometimes when journalists get to talking about FOIA fights, it’s we all got problems at our job. But like the reason that this matters for being able to understand this, the only reason I was able to write this story about the CIU, which notes that there’s these 21 guys who are sorry, 21 people, mostly men, but one woman, who were rejected by the CIU and then got exonerated anyway, right? You get it. There’s this set of 21 people whose cases really raised doubts about the CIU’s reviews because the CIU said no to them and then they showed enough proof of their innocence to go free, right? The reason I was able to find those people is because I had this rundown of what the CIU had done in all of these cases. And so the way that I discovered that sort of central fact of the CIU’s reputation and the CIU’s record, you know, which sort of conflicts with this reputation, is that I had this really nice set of records explaining what the agency had done in all of these different cases, like sometimes pretty granular stuff, like returning X employee returned the file to X room, right? And the and that’s that proved invaluable to my reporting because it just showed at a granularity, the office was not going to give me in any other way, like what this thing was doing. And the way this story really came about, the sort of nut of it came about, is that I kept looking at this and I’m like, Roosevelt Miles, I know that name, or Kevin Jackson, I know who that is. So I kept seeing guys in there where I’m like, oh, he got out anyway, and they told him no, right? So that’s sort of the basics of the story, and that’s why it mattered that at a certain point at least they were willing to give us those records.

Host: 18:55 Yeah, don’t ever think that you shouldn’t talk about FOIA. I don’t think FOIA has talked about enough. I don’t think I think the papers, such as they are now, and the media such as it is now, should have on the front page all the denials. Every time a politician’s office denies them, it should be there. We sued Kim Fox twice. We almost sued Anita Alvarez. And I remember talking to someone at the Tribune at the time over a course of months, we’re on sexual assault data, and she just said, This is inside baseball denials. I’m like, Yes, but the reason the politician is risking me going to court is that there’s something there, that’s why they’re denying it most of the time. There’s something there, or they’re worried there is something there, which is why you should want to go after it more because they don’t want to give it to you. So I talk about it all the time because it just annoys the living daylights. We’re twice against Kim Fox in court. I once got told they gave us data, but they didn’t give us any of the field names. And we asked for them on my not your on the phone with Matthew Saney, Kim Fox’s data guy. And he got aggravated with me saying, I want the I need the field names and I want the format of the databases. And he goes, It’s not our fault if you’re too stupid to understand the data. And I was like, Yeah. And he said something like similar to that, almost in open court, too.

Never apologize for talking to foyer. I think it should be talked about by the press a lot more. Okay. O’Neill Burke, like any politician, especially a prosecutor, especially in this day and age, are gonna feign a commitment, at least, to exonerating people who are wrongly convicted. She, however, has a history, a pretty public history here. In 1994, she prosecuted a 10-year-old boy who was later exonerated for a coerced confession. And if I remember from your reporting, she actually praised the detective, who, by the way, for those from Chicago, and if you’re not from Chicago, you should look up the Ryan Harris case, because the same detective got the confessions in the Ryan Harris case, very famous boo-boo by the Chicago Police Department. So, do you think it’s fair from people to question the commitment to running this unit from an elected prosecutor who has a such a glaring wrongful conviction in their record?

Dan HInkel: 21:34 That’s a good question. And I think not necessarily one for B. I think that that’s like I say, I put a lot of faith in people who read my stories to sort out their own view on it. I think with Burke, we now know. Like we I don’t think we I can go back and read the tea leaves on like our history or anything like that. Totally fair for anyone else who wants to try to go ahead, but for For me, at a certain point, she had enough record to look at in terms of what she has done. And I think that’s why at a certain point we wrote the story that was building on our work on the CIU saying, for as flawed as this thing was before, right? She has now essentially it doesn’t exonerate people anymore. Whatever you thought of its record before that, you couldn’t deny it did stuff. And at a certain point, it became when I started looking at it, it became really clear that under Eileen Dale Burke, it had essentially ground to a halt. And as of my reporting in when was that? Let me look. Sometimes I have to reacquaint myself with things I’ve written in my stories. As of the end of April, which was a year and a half into her first term, the CIU had not exonerated anyone, which is a fairly extraordinary slowdown activity from the 250 that you mentioned under K5. So yeah, I think it is I think it’s only fair to give elected officials a little bit of time, right? It’s like let them build a record, right? And then judge the record. And at a certain point, it just was really clear. And that I should be really clear myself that I sought to talk to I’ve sought to talk to Eileen or Burke on occasions that are now countless to me. It’s been a long time that I’ve been trying to make that happen. Eileen, if you’re listening, would still love to speak with you. But the so I really wanted that that badly wanted to get her perspective into there, and I had to use other other voices in that. But I should note that it’s not, I don’t know, her office has not strongly pushed back on anything that I said in any of these stories. So it’s not that there has been no denial of any of this beyond general kind of boilerplate statements from spokespeople. It would be a different, it would be a different journalistic situation if this were being very hotly contested, but it does it’s pretty clear that this is what’s going on. And yeah, it’s you can people are free to figure out whether they like it or don’t, but it’s very obvious that this is her perspective on wrongful convictions at this point.

Host: 24:08 Yeah, it’s pretty. That they could work in the Chicago justice system with the Chicago Police Department and some like we’ve had troubled departments throughout, we’ve had wrongful convictions of people taken off a death row and within days of dying, and not think there are wrong, there are some wrongfully convicted people out there, and either they’re not coming to your office or your office isn’t finding them. But if you have an office that’s set with a goal to review these things and they’re not finding any, there’s probably a problem. I know from like my lawyers that I work with on FOIA suits have told me many years ago, too, many years ago now, to not go to the public assets counselor at all. They viewed them as worthless and creating bad records. I once had a review of a Jody Wees, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department at the time, talked about a police, some study they had done that the Chicago Police Department had spent money on. And I foyered it and they denied it. And I sent it to the public access counselor, and the public access counselor says, since he only talked about it that one time publicly and no other time, they don’t need to turn it over. And of course, I waited a year to get that judgment. And my lawyers are like, don’t ever go back to them, they’re worthless. So I’m wondering now if that’s what’s gonna happen with this unit, is that these attorneys that are working on these cases are just gonna bypass the unit.

Dan HInkel: 25:45 That’s an interesting thing, and it’s something that happens early on in my reporting, and it’s reflected in what I wrote. Is that like there were some lawyers who were like, nah, I’m not doing this, right? I don’t trust it. Sorry. Like lawyers who have no animosity towards the state’s attorney’s office, but who said, I’m just gonna go win my case in court because like I don’t believe you’re just gonna throw it out, right? That’s not been my experience with prosecutors. There were other attorneys in the sort of post-conviction, wrongful conviction space who said, Hey, let’s give it a shot, right? Kim Fox is making noises we like. Let’s let’s take her at her word. And a lot of I spoke with attorneys, including some who considered themselves like friends and allies of Kim Fox, who were in this is representative story, who said they felt that her position on this had been sincere, but that whatever it’s turning the Titanic around and right, that it’s that she was working against other forces that were in her office, right? And that a lot of that’s all to say that a lot of the a lot pretty much to a person attorneys who handle post-conviction cases and wrongful conviction cases had changed their view on either never trusted it or changed their view to distrust it at a certain point because they came to feel that it was a not going to help them almost certainly, and B would prevent them from continuing to fight the case through the traditional route, through the PC route. And so I think that opinion generally holds that that folks just don’t want to waste the time. And like I say, I learned O’Brick’s CIU has not didn’t had not exonerated anyone in the first year and a half of her tenure. So if you’re an attorney who’s got one of these cases, I would it would be a totally valid question to say, what reason would you have to seek review by the CIU? Right. Of course, there are people who I get letters from them in in Illinois prisons who are looking for any avenue, right? Who are not correct, who do not have a lawyer. There are so I’m sure you can probably testify to this too. There are so many people in Illinois prisons who will write you a letter and say, you’ve got to look at my case. And I it breaks my heart because we do not have the time or the resources to sort all of these out. And I’m sure statistically, some of these guys are innocent, right? Just given the number of wrongful convictions there are, I’m sure I have looked at a letter from someone who is innocent and had to set it aside because there’s nothing I can do about it, and that sucks. But there are so many of those people who I think may well be continuing to go through the CIU. I don’t, we since we don’t have the data at this point, I can’t really know. But what I’m talking about is a case with the bar, right? With the lawyers who view it this way.

Host: 28:39 So O Neil Burke comes in and changes some of the rules around applying. And one of the things that caught my eye in your reporting around it is they won’t consider cases during any federal or state challenges or any litigation of any kind.

Dan HInkel: 28:55 Yeah, they did not elaborate, yeah, they didn’t elaborate on that to me. So I’m I’m can only take it at face value.

Host: 29:03 Yeah, that seems suspiciously part of the system view. If the person’s innocent, regardless of whether or not and how they’re litigating, your people should do the work and make their judgment. And whether it hurts the Chicago Police Department because it’s aiding a civil suit is irrelevant to your office. You have a sworn duty, you create an office to pursue this. Whether or not they’re going through the court should make no difference. That’s a political decision that’s being made by you. Maybe, and we’ll get to her quote in a minute, maybe has something to do with people that were on your transition committee, but let’s not jump there yet. But that did bug me. And when we compare the rates at which Fox and O’Neill Burke contested individuals going into court and I think going into court and again certificate of incidence, I believe. Fox contested about 25% of them. O’Neal Burke is contesting 82%. Is this her? Is this tied to a political view in an out in ideology? Is it about money because they’re trying to slow the amount of people winning litigation judgment against the city and the Chicago Police Department? I’m curious because I know Fox a lot of the time stayed out of this, unless she thought there was good reason to not stay out of it. Burklow, it seems to be, and I think from your reporting you have somewhere in there that they’re just going to pretty much contest almost all of that.

Dan HInkel: 30:39 Let me lay a little groundwork as to what the certificate of innocence is, because just in case someone’s watching who hasn’t been paying, who hasn’t been paying too much mind to that. A certificate of innocence is something you get after you are exonerated, right? That it’s or after you’re cleared, let out of prison, right? You undo your conviction. You seek a certificate of innocence. What a certificate of innocence does is allow you to apply for state compensation, a few hundred thousand dollars in a lot of cases. And it I spoke to all of these people who had sought them, and it’s like also has this kind of psychic power to these guys, right? That a lot of them are like, I just want the state to admit it’s wrong. I can’t go on with my life. You guys hurt my family, and I just want somebody to say, we screwed up, and that’s us, right? And so these are pretty popular with people who have been exonerated. The there’s also this other thing that you referenced hanging out there, which is the city of Chicago, of course, loses tons and tons of money related to federal lawsuits against its police department, right? This is like I wrote this story at the Tribune a decade ago, and that was a new version of a story that had been written a decade before that. And this problem has never gone away. The Chicago police get sued constantly and successfully. And wrongful convictions are a huge element of that. A certificate of innocence can be entered in a federal case in many cases, and the thing that the jury is out about, so to speak, is that is like what it really means. Like how valuable is it? That if you talk to folks in the plaintiff’s bar in civil rights lawsuits, they’ll say it’s we win without them, right? The city lost 120 million dollars at some point last year against two guys who didn’t have one, right? And so they’re clearly not a prerequisite to defeating the city of Chicago in court, which is a long tradition around here. The but there is this point of view among the police, sort of the police union, their allies, some folks in City Hall, that the certificates of innocence are a major prong of the problem. And that if they could stop people from having certificate of innocence certificates of innocence, then or question lay question the sort of provenance and the evidence behind these certificates of innocence that they’d have an easier time in federal court. Now, I’ve been around Chicago long enough to see the city try various things geared toward not losing in federal court, and they continue to lose in federal court quite extensively. I’m not sure. I don’t know what would happen if people stopped giving certificates of innocence. I’m not sure. There’s not really any particularly good evidence out there about that. But anyway, that’s all to say that yes, there was a pretty much night and day shift at a certain point where Kim Fox had been only in just prosecutors don’t have to take a position on this at all. They could just sit on the sidelines and be like, go with God. They objected to, I think 25% during her second term. And Burke early in her term, a few went forward without any objection, but after that, it’s pretty much all of them. I think four out of five cases, she her prosecutors had objected to them. They have talk about the money, and the money is not just subtext here, is like the text in certain cases. So there was an assistant states attorney who went into court in one of these certificate of innocence proceedings and said, once you get this certificate, the city and the county have to settle for millions, right? Obviously, there’s some dispute about as to whether that’s actually how this legal mechanism really works, but that’s the perspective on it. And Eileen O’Neill Burke, it’s not a complete mystery what she thinks about these, even though she won’t talk to me. It’s she has said, she told the Tribune that’s I think in a hundred-day one of those hundred-day stories after she took office, that she that she viewed certificates of innocence as being for people who had more ironclad evidence of their innocence, DNA was something I think she cited. Anyone who covers courts knows that there’s not a lot of those cases are fairly rare in the system. And so if your standard is and if you follow wrongful conviction cases in Chicago, and particularly the cases that relate to police accused of coercion, most of these cases are witness cases, and they’re fun fundamentally about the question of whether the witnesses were coerced into the witnesses or the defendant, were coerced into their inculpatory statements. And so if your standard is it’s gotta be DNA evidence, you’re just not gonna be giving out, you’re not gonna be signing off on very many certificates of innocence.

Host: 35:32 And she knew that, and that to me is a bogus statement from the core because she knows most of these things don’t have DNA, so she basically means all the misconduct that isn’t 100% provable, because if you’re recanting, you’re obviously lying, right? So that we can’t have that, so we’re not gonna reward people for getting people to recant. So we’re going to just give certificates into people who are ironclad. And since we believe all the detectives and they do nothing wrong, you’re not gonna get ironclad unless you get DNA. And the funny thing is, I’ve heard cops dispute DNA on when you when they have DNA and police, big police exoneration cases, but also police misconduct. They’re like DNA isn’t it. Okay, so there’s no level of proof you will ever take. And this sounds like this sounds a lot that O’Neill Burke has adopted that way of thinking, which given Chicago police department’s history for the decades, as you said, you keep writing the same misconduct stories 10 years and civil suit stories every 10 years. Last year it was $300 and some million dollars. Now that had 160 or 180 big, I think it was Gruvara, right? Settlement, class settlement, but still that still left another 140, 160, 180 million dollars paid out. Don’t worry, the year before it was 160 million or 120 million. It isn’t going away. You just said the numbers and the names, right? Exactly. And it’s like people, we don’t have the juries. The people, if you talk to uh some of the MAGA local politicians in Chicago, which we have some, they just call themselves Democrats, but they’re MAGA. While the public and the juries are horrible, it’s like, no, the juries remember the juries have seen everything, they’ve read the press, they’ve watched the news stories, they’ve seen people leave death row, they’ve seen people in their community beat up and acting detained and framed, they’ve seen it all. That’s why you’re not winning in court, right? You can’t get rid of the history.

Dan HInkel: 37:27 Yeah. There definitely is a dynamic in Chicago where that I’ve looked at for a long time where I’m sure you’ve paid at least passing attention to the FOP over the years. There’s a perspective among some of those folks that all Chicago would have to do to win this litigation is fight, right? That all they would have to do is go to court and try harder, basically, right? And that’s demonstrably not the case in terms of the number of cases that you just look at the record, like the number of times the city has gone, has fought it and lost, right? Like the just in Google Chicago police lawsuit verdict, right, and see what you get. Like there’s plenty of settlements, no doubt about that. But it’s also like the strategy of fighting has proven imperfect as well. Host: 38:14 Yeah, and I think the FOP is not a credible actor on any level, and the FOP leadership over the last six, eight years has been off the rails bad. January 6th is okay, there was no violence there, rails bad. But that said, I think they’re conflating fighting the five and 2,500 and $5,000 and $10,000 settlements, which there are a fair amount of. Oh, that was a lie. You could easily fight that in court, where you might fight it and lose $40,000, but maybe that towards future people. And the fighting of the $8 million, $5 million, $8 million, $20 million settlements. The lawyers and the the lawyers for the city, corporate counsel’s office, they’re not just settling because they’re lazy. It’s in their interest to reduce the amount of money the city has to pay out. They know what’s coming for them. I think the city could look at if the FLP wants to do and they want to fight this case, they’re gonna get a five, six, eight hundred million dollar bill one one year. When three or four big cases settle in a year, or not settle, but go through the trial, they’re just gonna get destroyed. I don’t think it’s a it’s uh I don’t think their view is based in reality, right? But they also think no one’s ever done anything wrong. The Lacquan McDonald murder wasn’t a murder, birds never did anything wrong. They all believe everything is great.

Dan HInkel: 39:38 Yeah, there is a no question a powerful strain of wrongful conviction denialism that has been a feature of life in the FOP for a long time.

Host: 39:47 Yeah, and what I don’t I’m gonna I have one question after this comment, but what I don’t understand is how the FOP maintains to exist as an organization when all they do, for the most part, when it comes to misconduct and abruce and brutality is hurt their own members. Fighting for the Jason Van Dyke killed Lequan McDonald. You can look at that video online. I’m certainly not showing it here. Fighting and and endorsing Van Dyke and supporting him and saying he did nothing wrong just makes the work environment that the other 8,000, 9,000 members you have, it makes their work environment worse. It just does. Everyone trusts them less, it’s just a reality. But you keep they fought all of those over all these years. Burge tortured, I don’t know, dozens to a couple hundred people. They keep fighting that. You just keep making the work situation for your other members who are doing their job well and respectfully and stuffing we all want them to do, and you just make their lives worse. But this is a mentality, it’s around the country, too. This isn’t just the Chicago FOP thing in New York and other large major cities, it’s the same way. It just drives me bananas, they’re not doing their members any favors. I have one last question, and you you mentioned his name, Mark Rotert, if I’m pronouncing that rotor. You have a quote from him, and I want to discuss it because it annoyed me. Because it I don’t not necessarily 100% he understood the job, but here it is. I believe personally, a conviction integrity unit loses its justification if it becomes an office where you where we don’t really pay attention to what the jury and an appellate court concluded, and we have this unilateral authority to reach our own determinations. Now, he led pretty well, led the unit from 17 to 19. I don’t know. I think the office was created to do their own determinants and not rely on the court or the jury because they’re looking at different things, and this is it’s a big philosophical question that underlies all of this.

Dan HInkel: 41:58 Like, what is the CIU for? Right. And I think that the frustration that you’re voicing was echoed by a lot of people, and I appreciate absolutely that Mark Roder spoke with me because it’s one of the on the record, one of the very few people associated with the C who did, and that’s commendable, right? The I think that there were a lot of people. There are a lot, I have talked to a lot of people in prison who run up against this idea that once the jury has spoken, it’s over, right? That like that it’s not the system, obviously, is incredibly reluctant to overturn the will of the jury, right? Like they’re great because finality, the system prizes finality, right? And so I get a lot of letters, like I say, from guys in prison who say, Look at the evidence in my case, it sucks, right? Like I couldn’t have done this. And then look at Kevin Jackson’s case, every witness against Kevin Jackson recanted before trial. Like there was no witness telling the story at trial who had told, right? No, no fact witness, no civilian fact witness telling the story at trial that the police had said they had told earlier. And I think it can be pretty puzzling for the lay person, like someone who’s not a lawyer, to look at that and say, if the evidence is bad or the evidence doesn’t make any sense, shouldn’t the system do something about that, right? And there’s a separate kind of legal logic that lawyers will voice. And this is what Mark Roder is saying is a is a voicing of that. And he’s not alone in viewing it this way that like a thing we can’t do is just willy-nilly get in there and start contradicting juries, right? But it also raises a really big question about what is the point of the CIU, what is the sort of I don’t know, how much power do they have if he’s going to if if the CIU is going to proceed according to this sort of theory that we can’t just be overturning. The will of the fact finder or the findings of the fact finder.

Host: 44:05 Yeah, and maybe, and I understand that, but I’m also understand how many of these cases come down to not a lot of physical evidence, and they have only witness testimony. And do we believe them when they testify to trial, or would do we believe them years later when they recant?

Dan HInkel: 44:27 Yeah, do you are you familiar with the legal term? It’s a phrase used in appeals decisions. No rational trier of fact could only be the thing that there’s a gentleman by the name of Juan Rivera in Lake County who was released from prison after the appeals court found no rational trier of fact could have found what the jury in your case did. And I’m not an attorney, I do not pretend to be an attorney, and so legal stuff should be run by lawyers. But what I know is that is incredibly rare, right? That does not happen very often.

Host: 44:58 Correct.

Dan HInkel: 44:59 Does not happen very often that someone in the system, it’s this is how the courts operate too. That it’s you read, you’ll read all you’ll read appeals’ decisions where it’s okay, it’ll be a recounting of the evidence, and you look at the evidence and you’re like, oh, that doesn’t look great. And then it’ll get to the end of it, and the court would be like, Yeah, but it’s not new. This doesn’t count as new evidence. The jury heard this, right? So for better and worse, finality is the order of the day, and I think that’s what he was getting at there.

Host: 45:28 Yeah, someone should more clearly establish with guidelines and everything, a clear delineation about what this unit was created for, what it’s supposed to do. Because I am curious, and I don’t think, and I guess this will be the last question. Do they when they apply to for certificate innocence in this unit, or the unit gets a case? Are they going back and re-interviewing people, or are they just looking at the record as it was created in the court and in the appeals?

Dan HInkel: 46:03 Sorry, can you run run that back on Mark?

Host: 46:05 Sure. So this office in the state’s attorney’s office, are they doing any investigation, or are they just looking at the record that was created in the court?

Dan HInkel: 46:16 Do you mean the CIU or when they review as the CIU? CIU, they will do their own investigation up to and including. This isn’t let me say this is in the past because the records, more current records, have been denied. They would send private investors, or not private investors, the should the state’s attorney’s office actually has a staff of investigators, mostly former police officers, who will go out and re-investigate a case. And you would see these guys getting deployed in the data, right? That they were saying, Hey, we drove down to X prison to talk to this witness or whatever. So, yeah, no, they were actually doing investigations, generating quite a lot of paper. And I requested the files in some of these cases, right? So some of these investigations could be pretty extensive. And one of the complaints that from the defense side of this, from the folks who were representing them, was a feeling like the Jennifer Bonjean, the lawyer who the said, you know, I felt like it was, I think she called it the conviction confirmation unit, right? There would be an investigation, but it felt to her anyway, from her perspective, like the investigation was geared toward just confirming the conviction, right? And another issue with that is it takes time, right? So for a lot of these guys, they’re sitting in prison for decades and they’re left to wait while the CIU worked on some of these cases for a couple of years before before saying no.

Host: 47:42 So it’s all so horrible. I I get emails about once a month from some prison. For a while, I was getting calls. It’s awful because I’m a one-man show. There’s nothing I can do. I’m not an investigator, I’m not an attorney, but it all just sucks. And I’m sure it’s got to suck for people on the flip side, which is your family member was murdered or you were brutalized or something, and then five years later they come away, and this person, oh, by the way, didn’t do it, and now they’re got a certificate of innocence. And there was corruption involved in the investigation. So the people you trusted to help you and get you justice, whatever that is, lied to you. Seems like you’re re-injuring the survivor a second time, you know, unneededly. All right. Dan Hinkle, thank you so much. I really appreciate you jumping on with us today. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. That was Injustice Watch senior reporter Dan Hinkle. O’Neill Burke has a political agenda, one that further punishes the wrongly convicted. Demands for ironclad proof is an obscene standard. And in my opinion, she probably knows that. It certainly is one that’s ahistorical, doesn’t take into account anything that’s come about before her in Chicago. There’s reasons the Chicago Police Department pays out on average $100 million a year, and on the last couple of years has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars a year. There’s a reason. Her tactics, her political agenda invites abusive police tactics. By the way, that’s what happened in her wrongful conviction, even though she vouched for that detective. And remember, ladies and gentlemen, I talked about a little bit in the video or the interview. Her tactics, like all bad police tactics, hurt good officers within the CPD, hurt the department, and then hurt communities that are most likely going to bear the brunt of police abuse, and that’s communities of color. Just for a moment, consider how many people are convicted on eyewitness testimony alone. For those who don’t know, there’s rarely cases that have DNA evidence and strong, you know, fingerprints that connect them. Many, if not most, of the cases that come through Cook County Criminal Court rely on eyewitnesses, circumstantial evidence, and put that together. There’s no DNA. It’s not that it never happens, but it’s rare. And that’s her standard now. Ironclad like DNA. She knows, she most likely knows that that is setting up a standard to which they will never exonerate anyone. And then people are going to languish in prison for no reason, come out and still win their lawsuits. This part of this agenda, which is obscene, in my perspective, is that they’re trying to curtail the money that Chicago and the Chicago Police Department lose in civil suits. That isn’t O’Neill Burke’s mandate. She shouldn’t care at all about it. She should not have a single policy in what they do that has any concern for Chicago’s budget, their lawsuits, nothing. If she wanted to do things, she would more vigorously train her staff to identify and report police abuse, be highly suspect of detectives that routinely get confessions when there’s so little evidence to back them up. But that’s not what she’s doing. Of course not. It all seems wrapped up in this MAGA type mentality that’s infiltrating a lot of the good amounts of the city council in Chicago. It’s very sad. You look at the number of cases that don’t have anything that’s super concrete. You know, what’s concrete evidence about being abused by officers and forced into a false confession? What’s concrete about it? Nothing. So unless if it happens, she’s they’re never going to overturn a case because you can’t prove that a million percent. Also, remember, people that are now recanting their testimony, obviously they’re not lying now because it’s against what the state’s attorney believes. Couldn’t possibly be that they were lying before. Couldn’t possibly be that they were coerced before because they don’t care about it. Got DNA, that’s all we care about. It’s funny though, if you think about it, the rank hypocrisy that’s at work here when you need DNA evidence to get exonerated, but you don’t need ironclad DNA evidence to get convicted. Testimony from eyewitnesses, circumstantial evidence, that’s enough. It’s enough to get you into prison. It just isn’t enough to get you out. Rank hypocrisy. It’s political political agendas over communities, the oppressed, police working conditions. As long as the political agenda is being fed, that’s all that matters. The other three, they don’t matter at all. Thanks for listening. As always, please share with your friends and contacts, and I’ll be back with you next week.