CWC - Key Persons
Before his exoneration on June 28, 2013, Daniel Taylor, a client of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, languished behind bars for more than two decades for a double murder to which he confessed as a teenager but could not have committed because he was in police custody for disorderly conduct when the murders occurred.
Taylor was 17 when he was arrested on December 3, 1992, and charged with the November 16 shooting deaths of Sharon Haugabook and Jeffrey Lassiter in their apartment near Clarendon Park on Chicago's north side.
Two weeks after the murders, police arrested two teenagers on drug charges; they eventually confessed to participating in the murders and implicated Taylor and five others-all of whom confessed after police interrogation, each implicating the others. Well before indictments were filed, however, Taylor recalled that he had been in police custody at the time of the murders.
The murders occurred at 8:43 p.m. Police records confirmed that that Taylor had been arrested for disorderly conduct at 6:45 p.m. that evening and held in the 23 rd District police lockup until 10:00 p.m.
Even though police records backed up Taylor's alibi, prosecutors brought charges against him and the other seven individuals who confessed. Charges against two of them were dismissed before trial, and one was acquitted, but the other five, including Taylor, were convicted based on their dubious confessions.
At trial, the only evidence of Taylor's guilt was his confession. His defense was that had been in a police lockup when the crime occurred-supported by the testimony of the officer in charge of the lockup and the officer who made the disorderly conduct arrest. The prosecution contended that the police records were inaccurate and presented the testimony of a drug dealer and a police officer who claimed to have seen Taylor on the street during the time he claimed to have been in custody. The jury found Taylor guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison.
In 2001, the Chicago Tribune investigated the case and found new evidence corroborating Taylor's claim that he had been in police custody when the crime occurred. The new evidence included an interview with a man who had been in the lockup with Taylor at the time of the murders; a previously unknown witness who saw the offenders leaving the murder scene and said that Taylor was not one of them; and a recantation by the drug dealer who claimed to have seen Taylor in a park that evening, when lockup records showed Taylor was in custody. Taylor, relying on the new evidence unearthed by the Tribune, filed a petition for post-conviction relief, but it was denied without a hearing.
Dionne Stanley, who after the crime gave birth to a healthy child and moved to Milwaukee, was a reluctant witness. Because she would not appear voluntarily to testify against Holland, prosecutors had her arrested and jailed as a material witness to compel her testimony. By the time she finally testified, she had been in custody 30 days. Conceding that she initially had said Holland was not the man, Stanley proceeded to identify him in court as the man who raped her three times.
By now, the prosecution of Gordon Bolden for the rape was barred by the statute of limitations, then three years but since eliminated in DNA cases. No longer in jeopardy, Bolden now provided the testimony that he had been advised by counsel not to provide in the Wembley case two years earlier. On the stand, Bolden stated that he had had sex with Stanley, although he claimed it was consensual. He also testified that the wet gym shoes police found immediately after the crime were his.
Holland testified that he was awakened about 6 a.m. on February 22, when Bolden came into the apartment building. Holland gathered up some garbage in his room and took it outside, where police spotted him and took him into custody.
A few hours after Linn ruled, the prosecution asked to supplement the record by calling Freeman to rebut Stanley's testimony. At the reopened hearing on May 2, Freeman denied both showing Stanley a photograph of Bolden and telling her that DNA had implicated Holland.
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- Senior Counsel at Northwestern University School of Law 's Center
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- Orchid Cellmark DNA Analyst
Orchid Cellmark DNA analyst Kristin D. Koch reported on September 23, 2002, that she had excluded Dana Holland as the source of the sperm sample recovered from Dionne Stanley.
Nineteen years after he was convicted of a rape that occurred in 1987 in the Village of Woodridge west of Chicago, Marcus A. Lyons was exonerated by DNA testing that linked semen recovered from the victim's bra and underpants to an unknown man - who subsequently was identified but not prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired. Although the crime occurred before the dawn of the DNA forensic age, conventional ABO testing in use at the time would have prevented Lyons's wrongful prosecution - if only the bra and underpants had been tested - but, due to Woodridge detective's malfeasance, they weren't.
The victim, Rebecca Auten, a 29-year-old Caucasian, reported the rape to Woodridge police at 11:20 p.m. on November 30, 1987. She said she'd been relaxing in her apartment - wearing a robe, bra, and underpants - when a man knocked on her door at around 8:30 p.m., saying he was "Mr. Williams from downstairs" and asking to borrow a plunger. When she told him she didn't have a plunger, he asked to use her bathroom. She allowed him inside, sat down on her living room couch, and lit a cigarette. The man then forced her to disrobe and raped her.
When he left, Auten put on the robe, bra, and underpants she previously had been wearing, but took them off a little later to shower, leaving them on her bathroom floor. After the shower, she dressed, putting on clean underpants, and called a close friend who came to her apartment, where they talked until Auten called the police. After interviewing Auten, an officer photographed the garments on the bathroom floor and put them into an evidence bag, which he took to police headquarters and put into a property control locker.
Detective James Grady took Auten to a hospital in nearby Naperville, where a sexual assault kit was prepared. Grady took the kit and Auten's underpants - the clean ones she put on after showering - to police headquarters, where they also were out into a property control locker.
Auten described the rapist as an African American between 25 and 30, standing about 5-9, weighing about 200 pounds, having a large belly and hips, and wearing brown polyester pants and a blue parka with a fur collar - which she had burned with her cigarette. From Auten's description, police created a composite sketch both the manager of the apartment complex where the rape occurred and Auten's next-door neighbor both told police looked like the only African American resident of the complex - Marcus Lyons.
Police went to Lyons's apartment, which he gave them consent to search. Found brown polyester pants and a blue nylon jacket, but the pants had a 32-inch waist, too small for a 200-pound man, and the jacket had no fur collar. Lyons, a 29-year-old Navy veteran and reservist with no criminal record, denied the crime, but had no alibi.
On December 3, Detective Grady showed Auten an array of six photographs, including one of Lyons, which police obtained from AT&T Bell Laboratories, where Lyons was a computer operator. His photo showed him in a white shirt and tie, differing from the other five photos, which were police mug shots. From the array, Auten identified Lyons as the rapist. Grady then took the rape kit and underpants Auten put on after showering - but not the garments she'd left on the bathroom floor before showering - to the DuPage County Crime Laboratory for forensic analysis.
On December 4, at the request of police, Lyons stood in a live lineup with five other men at the DuPage County jail. He was the only man in the lineup whose photo Auten had seen the previous day and - although he was a trim 165 pounds, not the heavy-set man she initially described - she again identified him. Lyons agreed to take a polygraph examination, which was administered the next day, December 5, by Richard O'Brien, a private polygraph examiner in Hinsdale, Illinois.
On December 7, the DuPage County Crime Lab reported finding nothing of evidentiary significance in the rape kit or on the underpants that Detective Grady had submitted for analysis. The same day, O'Brien issued a report saying that the polygraph results indicated Lyons was deceptive when he denied the crime. On December 16, a DuPage County grand jury returned an indictment charging Lyons with two counts of criminal sexual assault and one count of unlawful restraint.
At Lyons's trial in October 1988, the prosecution, led by Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Birkett, introduced the post-shower underpants and rape kit results into evidence, but said nothing about the garments that had not been tested. Lyons's defense lawyer, Thomas Freeman, was under the erroneous impression that the underpants entered into evidence were those Auten had put on after the rape and left on her bathroom floor. Both Freeman and Birkett, in fact, explicitly told the jury that. Detective Grady, who was present in the courtroom and knew that information was erroneous, did nothing to correct it. The jury found Lyons guilty on all counts and, on October 19, 1988, Judge Ronald Mehling sentenced him to six years in prison. Lyons retained a Chicago lawyer, George C. Howard Jr., to appeal the conviction, but Howard, who recently had been reprimanded by the Illinois Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission for neglecting another client, failed to file the appeal.
On March 15, 1991, with credit for good behavior, Lyons was released from prison. Thirteen days later, he donned his Navy uniform and went to the old DuPage County courthouse in downtown Wheaton, where he tried to crucify himself - literally - on a cross he had made from railroad ties. Just as he nailed one foot to the cross, however, the police arrived - "Come on nigger," said one officer, "your 15 minutes of fame are over" - and forcibly removed Lyons.
In 2005, after learning that not all of the physical evidence had been tested, Lyons turned to more conventional means of pursuing justice. He retained the Waukegan law firm of Stone & Associates, which filed a motion for post-conviction DNA testing of the untested items. Joseph Birkett, who by this time in his second term as the elected state's attorney of DuPage County, had no objection. The testing was performed in stages by the DuPage County Crime Laboratory, which reported on January 16, 2007, that semen recovered from the previously untested garments "could not have originated from Marcus Lyons." In addition, the testing determined that if the garments had been subjected to conventional ABO testing in 1987, Lyons would have been eliminated as the source of the semen before he was indicted; the semen came from someone with Type A blood, but Lyons had Type B.
On July 27, 2007, Stone & Associates filed a petition for post-conviction relief, which Birkett did not oppose. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "Marcus Lyons deserves to have his record cleared." Six weeks later, DuPage County Circuit Court Judge Robert J. Anderson vacated Lyon's conviction and Birkett dismissed the charges the following September 18.
Marshall Raymond, one of officers whom Wembley flagged down at 79th and Ashland, testified that Wembley described the man who slashed her as having a medium complexion and weighing 160 pounds. Raymond continued that she said the other participant in the crime, the driver of the car, had a darker complexion and was heavier. Raymond also said that Wembley said the car involved was a brown Chevrolet.
On cross examination by Daniel, Raymond testified that, contrary to Wembley's testimony, the sun was not coming up - it was dark. Also, Raymond said she told him she was unemployed, contrary to her later claim that she worked as a telephone receptionist the Board of Education.
Two weeks later, early the morning of February 22, police were summoned to an alley off 77th Street near Paulina, where a woman was being raped. When officers entered the alley, a noticeably pregnant woman jumped out of a 1981 white Oldsmobile and ran toward them. A man jumped out of the car and ran the opposite direction. One of the officers gave the victim a coat and seated her in the back of the Oldsmobile.
The other officer chased the fleeing man, but lost sight of him. The officer then followed footprints on the snow-covered ground to an apartment building at 7821 S. Paulina, where he saw Dana Holland putting some things into a garbage can. Inside the building, police found a pair of wet gym shoes that appeared to match the footprints in the snow.
Holland was taken into custody. The victim, Dionne Stanley, 22, initially said Holland was not the man who attacked her, but minutes later said he was the man after all. As a result, he was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault.
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- Co - Director ( Currently on Leave )