STORY: Inmate for 15 years freed after conviction tossed in Chicago killing, by reporter Jason Meisner, published byThe Chicago Tribune on October 4, 2016.
GIST: "Norman McIntosh was in his cell Tuesday afternoon at Stateville
Correctional Center when he got the news he'd been dreaming about for
15 years.........McIntosh, 37, was the third inmate in
just eight days to be freed from the maximum-security Stateville
facility outside Joliet after a Cook County murder conviction had
unraveled. Charles Johnson was released Sept. 26 after a judge
dismissed his conviction for a 1995 double murder at a Southwest Side
car dealership in light of new fingerprint evidence. A day later, Mark
Maxson's 20 years behind bars ended when new DNA evidence exonerated him
in the brutal murder and sexual assault of a 6-year-old boy in
Chicago's Roseland neighborhood........The decision to throw out McIntosh's conviction came more
than three years after he filed a petition for a new trial, claiming
that police had rigged a lineup and pressured several witnesses into
identifying him, all of whom testified at trial but later recanted. His
lawyer also turned up fingerprint evidence that appeared to point to
another man as the killer, and records that showed the car McIntosh was
allegedly driving that day had been impounded by the city months
earlier. Last year, McIntosh's murder case was identified as one
of hundreds of so-called "street files" found in old filing cabinets in
the basement of the Area Central police station, files that are now at
the center of a federal lawsuit alleging police routinely buried
information about homicide investigations that could have helped defense
attorneys prepare for trial. Blagg told the Tribune the
information she found in McIntosh's street file —including lineup cards,
detectives' notes and other materials — helped her piece together
details of the investigation and poke holes in the police theory. In
a statement Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Cook County State's Attorney
Anita Alvarez said the decision to drop the charges was made after
"additional evidence" surfaced in the case, not because of the street
file litigation. Without the evidence, the office said, it wasn't
confident of being able to prove McIntosh's guilt. The case began
to unravel in early 2013 when (defence lawyer Jennifer) Blagg tracked down the witnesses who told
her they'd been pressured by detectives to identify McIntosh as the
gunman. In a sworn statement, James Hobson, who was wounded in the
chest in the shooting, said police told him after he was released from
the hospital that they had caught the killer and wanted him to identify
the man at the police station. "They showed me a picture of Norman
and said, 'This is the guy,'" Hobson said in the statement. "I knew
(the shooter) wasn't Norman because the guy who did it was taller and
looked older." Hobson said he made the identification only after
detectives threatened to pin the murder on him because a robbery of a
gang rival he'd committed had led to the killing.........Blagg also matched fingerprints to a
convicted felon who lived in the neighborhood and drove a similar car,
court records show. Recently, Blagg said she found records showing the
owner had the car salvaged for scrap shortly after the slaying. In
August 2015, while McIntosh's petition for a new trial was under review
by the state's attorney's office's Conviction Integrity Unit, Blagg was
contacted by attorney Candace Gorman, who had found McIntosh's street
file among hundreds of other old murder cases in filing cabinets at the
detective headquarters at 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue. The
Tribune first wrote about the cabinets' discovery in a front-page report
in April 2014. A street file on Gorman's client, reputed El Rukn
lieutenant Nathson Fields, had been found there three decades after his
conviction in an infamous 1981 double murder. Fields was sent to death
row, but his conviction was later overturned after it was discovered the
trial judge had taken a bribe to fix the case. After he was
freed, Fields filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit against Chicago police
and prosecutors alleging his street file was buried in an effort to
frame him for the killings. The file contained evidence of other
potential suspects that was not turned over to his trial lawyers. At
trial in 2014, Gorman had the cabinet hauled into a federal courtroom
to show the jury where Fields' file had been found. The jury, however,
ruled against Fields on all but one count and awarded him just $80,000
in damages. But in April 2015, U.S. District Judge Matthew
Kennelly ordered a new trial. In doing so, Kennelly made the bombshell
decision to allow Gorman to expand her investigation well beyond Fields'
file, giving her wide range to dig into the rest of the cabinets in her
effort to show the burying of street files was a de facto policy of the
Police Department. The retrial on Fields' lawsuit is set for next month. Blagg, meanwhile, said she was able to compare the information
found in McIntosh's street file with the file kept by his trial lawyers
with the Cook County Public Defender's Office. There were numerous
discrepancies, she said, including progress reports with times and dates
that didn't match up, handwritten notes on witness statements that
described the car differently and two versions of a lineup report that
were signed by different supervisors. "There wasn't anything explosive, but little things that made you question different aspects of his case," Blagg said."
