AChicagojudge threw out the convictions on Tuesday of six men who served a combined 124 years in prison for the 1987 stabbing death of a local government official.
Attorneys for the men successfully petitioned a Cook county court to overturn the convictions based on new DNA evidence as well as allegations of misconduct by a now retired Chicago police detective linked to at least 51 other wrongful convictions.
Attorneys for the six men convinced a court in 2021 to have the murder weapon – a cake knife found in the victim’s apartment – tested for DNA. Those tests found DNA from an unknown person on the weapon but excluded each of the convicted men.
The convictions of Fernando Gomez, Lowell Higgins-Bey, Michael McCastle, Harry Rodriguez and brothers Gregorio and Robert Cardona were based largely on confessions they claim were coerced when Chicago police detectives physically and psychologically abused them.
“This is a sad case. It’s just a tragedy,” said Cook county judge Carol Howard, who presided over the exonerations.
The men had been convicted of murdering Raymond Carvis, a 47-year-old man who held several high-ranking positions within Cook county government agencies. Carvis was found with at least 19 stab wounds, including a fatal wound to his neck and head with a blow so forceful that the tip of the cake knife broke off and remained in his body.
“In a crime of this extremely physical nature, the likelihood of the perpetrator cutting themselves while handling the knife is extremely high,” attorneys for the men wrote in a court filing.
Lauren Kaeseberg, an attorney representing the men, said her clients jumped at the chance to give their DNA.
“From day one, every single one of them said: ‘Test everything, there’s nothing that scares us,’” she said. “‘We were never in that house.’”
In the hours after Carvis’s murder, police seemed to be zeroing in on a suspect. Witnesses pointed to a handyman who had previously done work for Carvis and with whom he had told friends he had “a date” the day of his murder. The handyman was also suspected in a nearly identical murder four months earlier, of another older man with whom he was allegedly romantically involved, according to court papers.
The case switched gears three days later when detective Ernest Halvorsen entered the investigation. Halvorsen “steered the investigation away” from the handyman and toward the six men, according to a legal filing by the men’s attorney.
“They were forced to confess with promises of not only can you go home but they were also beaten into their confession,” Michael Oppenheimer, another attorney representing the men, said in court.
Sign up toHeadlines US
Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning
after newsletter promotion
Some of the statements Halvorsen collected implicated a man named Amador “Pee Wee” Torres. But when detectives learned that Torres had an airtight alibi – he was in police custody at the time of Carvis’s murder – detective Reynaldo Guevara found another man with the nickname “Pee Wee” – in this case, Gomez – to take Torres’s place in the investigation.
Dozens of people convicted of murders from the late 1980s through the early 2000s in Chicago’s predominately Puerto Rican neighborhoods on the city’s north-west side have had their convictions overturned based on claims that Guevara beat and threatened suspects and witnesses into making false identifications or confessions. An Illinois appellate court called Guevara a “malignant blight” on the city’s criminal legal system. In many of those cases, Halvorsen was his partner. The Carvis murder case is the first of the Guevara-related exonerations in which DNA testing helped overturn convictions.
Defendants in those cases – most of whom spent decades in prison – have filed lawsuits against Guevara, Halvorsen and the city of Chicago. The city has paid nearly $100m in settlements and legal fees. Some legal experts estimate that these lawsuits could cost the city up to $2bn.
An attorney for Guevara declined comment. The detective has repeatedly invoked his fifth amendment right to remain silent when questioned in the cases. Halvorsen died in 2020.
Not all of the defendants were in court on Tuesday for the exoneration. Rodriguez, who was 19 years old when arrested for Carvis’s murder, died of muscular sclerosis in 2019 while in prison serving a life sentence in the case. His son, Daniel, wore a shirt with his father’s picture on it to courtto hear his father’s name be cleared.