PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The lawsuit alleges that Walker was locked in a cage and later led to the interrogation room, where one of the defendants slammed him against the wall. It states that he was not told why he was arrested and was denied a call to his attorney, and that he cried and begged the officers to stop. Walker signed a false confession out of fear, a decision that led him to spend more than three decades behind bars, according to the lawsuit."
--------------------------------------------------------------
QUOTE TWO OF THE DAY: "Candido Ublies, who goes by the nickname Naji, is a case manager at the Chicago Torture Justice Center who worked with Walker. He says one of the most disheartening realities is knowing that the injustice Walker faced is not an isolated incident. “This problem is across the city,” Ublies said. “There are people who are locked inside and walking free outside fighting the same battle we’ve fought for 40 and 50 years.”
----------------------------------------------------------
“You’ll get a front-row seat experience of the extremes the police will go through to get a confession on a crime you had nothing to do with,” Walker said.
Walker’s attorney, Sean Starr with Loevy & Loevy, said his firm was working to start a new chapter for Walker — starting that morning at the U.S. District Court for the Northeastern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, where the suit was filed.
“Today, Keith is seeking a small measure of justice,” Starr said.
Walker said he didn’t file the lawsuit for financial gain, but so that the mistreatment he faced will be recognized and punished.
“Money comes and goes,” said Walker. “But you don’t.”
In 1991, Walker was 23 and living with his pregnant girlfriend and her daughter. The young couple was preparing to welcome their son into the world. But in the early morning of June 3 of that year, life would change for Walker.
Police alleged that Walker was with 18-year-old Shawn Wicks, a suburban teenager who traveled to South Laflin Street on Chicago’s South Side to buy marijuana, when he shot Wicks four times in the chest, back and legs.
A week later, Wicks died of his wounds and Walker was charged with first-degree murder. No physical evidence ever connected Walker to the crime.
The lawsuit states that Walker was “forced to confess” to the murder of Wicks and alleges that the confessions obtained were “the product of abuse by police detectives working under now-infamous Commander Jon Burge.”
Burge died in 2018, but his estate is named in the lawsuit.
The notorious former police officer served as a commander from 1986 until his firing in 1993. Special prosecutors alleged Burge and his crew of rogue detectives tortured criminal suspects to coerce confessions, and he was ultimately convicted of lying about torturing suspects.
Some of Burge’s detectives are also being sued. The lawsuit lists as defendants Daniel McWeeney, John Halloran, Anthony Maslanka, William Moser, Louis Caesar, Jack McCann, Thomas Brankin, Robert Lane, Nicholas Crescenzo, Craig Cegilski, John Smith, David Golubiak and J. Griffin.
The lawsuit alleges that Walker was locked in a cage and later led to the interrogation room, where one of the defendants slammed him against the wall. It states that he was not told why he was arrested and was denied a call to his attorney, and that he cried and begged the officers to stop.
Walker signed a false confession out of fear, a decision that led him to spend more than three decades behind bars, according to the lawsuit.
In 1994, Walker was convicted and given a life sentence. In 2020, prosecutors dropped his case and he was released by the Illinois Department of Corrections. Records show that after 2004, post-conviction trials were pending for Walker. Four years later, the Illinois attorney general’s office appointed a special prosecutor to the case but a judge found out that there was a conflict of interest between Burge and the office.
More than a decade later, prosecutors with the attorney general’s office decided to end the case, and Walker was exonerated in August 2020.
Walker’s attorney says the world has changed radically since he’d been “kidnapped and thrown into a maximum security prison.”
“He is trying to reconstitute a life and a 30-year void in anyone’s life is a void that is not fillable,” Starr said.
He missed the birth of his son and the childhoods of both his son and daughter. He missed the funerals of his father, stepmother, aunt, uncle and several cousins. And he missed most of the life with the woman he was truly close to, his grandmother, who died shortly after his release from prison in 2020.
Since then, Walker said he has been working to rebuild and reconnect with family members. His two nephews, Kendell Godfrey, 33, and Santrell Henderson, 27, have taught Walker everything from using his iPhone to the latest clothing styles.
“We’re teaching him everything he’s missed out on and we’re learning about the life he lived over these past 30 years,” Godfrey said. “All we want is justice.”
Candido Ublies, who goes by the nickname Naji, is a case manager at the Chicago Torture Justice Center who worked with Walker. He says one of the most disheartening realities is knowing that the injustice Walker faced is not an isolated incident.
“This problem is across the city,” Ublies said. “There are people who are locked inside and walking free outside fighting the same battle we’ve fought for 40 and 50 years.”
The entire story can be read at:
