Prosecutor admitted in FBI report that Chicago teens were coerced into false confessions

For years, four Chicago men have maintained that misconduct by police and prosecutors led to their wrongful convictions for a 1994 rape and murder. They did so at trial and even after their release from prison years later.

Now, their lawyers say in court papers, they have new evidence of wrongdoing: an FBI report that quotes a former Cook County prosecutor admitting that the four were fed information by Chicago police and coerced into making false confessions that DNA evidence ultimately undermined.

The case involves the Englewood Four — teens at the time of the crime who each spent close to 16 years in prison for the rape and murder of Nina Glover. The men were cleared after tests in 2011 matched DNA from Glover’s body to Johnny Douglas, a convicted murderer and serial sex offender who was shot to death in 2008.

Prosecutors, though, discounted Douglas’ DNA match, saying that Glover’s history of trading sex for drugs made it possible she had consensual sex with him. But a judge threw out the convictions of the four and later granted them certificates of innocence, both over the objections of prosecutors.

The Englewood Four — Michael Saunders, Vincent Thames, Harold Richardson and Terrill Swift — later filed lawsuits alleging they were coerced into making false confessions that led to their convictions.

Among those sued was Kenneth Boudreau, a longtime detective whose history of obtaining dubious confessions was detailed in the 2001 Chicago Tribune series Cops and Confessions. The suits also named James Cassidy, a detective key in obtaining false confessions from 7- and 8-year-old boys for killing 11-year-old Ryan Harris in 1998. The boys, as it turned out, could not have produced the semen found on Harris’ body; a convicted sex offender later pleaded guilty.

The detectives, both now retired, have denied wrongdoing in their investigation of Glover’s strangulation death, as did Terence Johnson, a prosecutor who helped conduct the interrogations and obtain the confessions, Still, the case was troubling enough that federal authorities began a civil rights investigation in 2011 into the allegations of misconduct by police and prosecutors. But no charges ever resulted, and the investigation has since been closed.

As part of that investigation, FBI agent Jeffrey Moore, who works out of the Chicago office, interviewed Johnson in March 2012. It is Moore’s six-page report, called a 302 in FBI parlance, that lawyers for the Englewood Four have described in court papers as a bombshell.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheila Finnegan has said “damaging statements” allegedly made by Johnson could be crucial to the lawsuits and has given the lawyers representing the Englewood Four permission to question Moore under oath as well as Johnson for a second time.

The Englewood Four lawyers have said the FBI report contradicts testimony from Johnson in his first sworn deposition in the lawsuit. The 302 report has not been made public; indeed, this part of the lawsuit is playing out with some court papers heavily blacked out and lawyers restricted in what they can discuss.

But according to a few details from the FBI report included in court filings by the Englewood Four lawyers, Johnson told Moore that the officers had “coached and fed” details to the teens and said the investigation was “going to come back” — somehow unravel — because it did not make sense.

The Englewood Four lawyers, in their characterization of the FBI report, said Johnson told the agent that the detectives “coerced [them] to confess and sign written confessions.” Johnson also suggested, the lawyers wrote, that the detectives “conspired to lie in court to cover up” the alleged misconduct and that he and another prosecutor, Fabio Valentini, now one of outgoing State’s Atty. Anita Alvarez’s top deputies, chose not to tell supervisors.

Valentini, chief of the office’s criminal prosecutions bureau, has denied any misconduct.

Johnson, in court papers, described Moore’s report as “mental impressions” and inadmissible “double and triple hearsay.” Johnson claims the report is an inaccurate account of what he told the agent.

Johnson’s once-promising legal career ended after his guilty plea in 2000 to two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in Kane County in exchange for a sentence of 30 months of probation. He admitted having sexual contact with two girls — one a teenager, the other younger than 13. After 10 years in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, he was fired earlier in 2000 and agreed the following year to surrender his law license as he faced possible disbarment. Now 51, he is listed on the state sex offender registry.

Johnson declined to comment to the Tribune, but his lawyer, Patricia Bobb, said that a jury ultimately will have to decide whether the FBI report, if it is admitted as evidence at trial, supports a claim that the Englewood Four were framed by any of the police or prosecutors.

“It’s our position that there’s nothing in those documents that changes our case. If there was anything there, something would have happened with the FBI,” Bobb said of the agency’s civil rights investigation. “And nothing did.”

The Police Department and the city’s Law Department declined comment because the lawsuit is pending.

Mills and Lighty write for the Chicago Tribune.

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