By Michael GsovskiThe Daily Northwestern
Within three weeks this winter, three Illinois men were released from prison, due in part to the efforts of a program at Northwestern’s law school.
The NU Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions provided legal counsel and services to Marlon Pendleton, Robert Wilson and Johnnie Lee Savory.
Founded in 1999, the center works to give legal aid to wrongfully convicted individuals and help them reintegrate into society upon release. The center also is involved in efforts to reform the criminal justice system, said Executive Director Rob Warden.
“The whole jury system is predicated on a myth,” Warden said. “That myth being that you can put 12 people into a jury box, have them take an oath and they can somehow discern truth that is not readily available to anyone else. It’s just not true.”
Marlon Pendleton was convicted of the 1992 rape of a woman on the South Side of Chicago. Pendleton was identified in a lineup, but the lineup occurred six months after the attack, said Karen Daniel, a staff attorney for the center and one of Pendleton’s lawyers.
During the lineup he was led past the victim in handcuffs, making it obvious that he had been arrested for the crime, Daniel said.
“Yes, there was an eyewitness identification, but it was weak,” she said. “There was nothing else that tied him to the crime, there was no physical evidence.”
Pendleton repeatedly requested DNA tests of physical evidence left at the scene by the perpetrator, but the judge deemed the evidence inadmissable, Daniel said.
DNA tests eventually revealed that Pendleton was innocent, Daniel said. He was released a week later on Nov. 30 after serving 14 years in prison.
Another of the exonerated men, Robert Wilson, was convicted in 1997 of assaulting June Siler. During Wilson’s trial, Judge Kenneth Wadas refused to allow information about similar crimes that had occurred within a one mile radius of the assault, Daniel said. The perpetrator of these similar crimes confessed to all of them, Daniel said, except for the attack on Siler, about which he was never questioned.
Wilson’s lawyers, Daniel and Jane Raley, who also worked on the Pendleton case, filed a petition for a new trial. After the request was granted, Siler retracted her identification of Wilson as the attacker.
Charges against Wilson were dropped, and he was released from prison on Dec. 4 after serving 9 years.
The center also was involved in the release of Johnnie Lee Savory on parole. Savory served 30 years after being convicted of the murder of two friends when he was 14. Lawyers from NU’s center said the conviction was based on a false confession Savory signed under duress.
“The case against Johnnie bore all the hallmarks of a wrongful confession case,” said Steven Drizin, the center’s legal director and a critic of improper interrogation techniques. “The confession came after hours of interrogation of a 14-year-old boy, separated from his father or a lawyer or a guardian, after two polygraph tests were given to him, during a time when he received little in the way of food or sleep.”
Although Savory is out on parole, it still might be difficult to legally prove his innocence, Drizin said. Evidence from the crime scene exists in Peoria County, but local authorities have not allowed DNA testing.
NU’s center will continue to pursue the case.
“We happen to be in the unique position of never having lost a case,” said Warden, the center’s executive director. “It doesn’t mean that we’ve won them all, but we’ve never lost one. It’s never over, we’ll go back and back and back until we’ve exhausted all remedies. And we’re not old enough (as an organization) to have exhausted all remedies.”
Reach Michael Gsovski at [email protected].
