It took three years, but Cook County prosecutors on Monday finally dropped charges against two Chicago men who have been serving life sentences for a murder and rape they didn’t commit.
Prosecutors deserve credit for the hard work they did that discredited every piece of evidence against Harold Hill and Dan Young Jr. Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine has sharply raised the standards of proof needed to prosecute serious cases such as this one. This case, had it been initiated today, never would have seen the inside of a courtroom.
But it’s still disappointing that prosecutors show little interest in determining exactly what went wrong with the original investigation in this case, which is needed to ensure that such mistakes can’t happen again.
This case points to the capacity of suspects, often under pressure, to confess to horrible acts they didn’t commit. It also underscores a reality of forensic evidence: Sometimes “science” is more art or conjecture than hard fact.
Hill and Young were convicted of the murder of 39-year-old Kathy Morgan on the basis of dubious confessions and a bite mark found on Morgan, whose body was discovered inside a burning South Side building in 1990.
A Park Ridge dentist at the trial linked Young to the bite mark but later conceded to Tribune reporters that his testimony might have been overstated because prosecutors pressed him. “You get pushed a little bit by prosecutors, and sometimes you say `OK’ to get them to shut up,” the dentist, John Kenney, told Tribune reporters last year. A prominent forensic scientist later discredited that link because of fire damage to the victim’s skin.
Both men confessed to the crime. So did a third man, who gave the most vividly detailed statement, but it turned out he had been behind bars at the time of the crime. That brought into question all three confessions. The three men didn’t know each other.
Recent DNA tests run on fingernail scrapings and fluids found on the victim’s body also excluded Hill and Young.
Hill was 16 when the murder occurred. Young was 31 and had an IQ of 56, 19 points below the state standard for mental retardation. Youth and mental incapacity made them unusually susceptible to suggestion. Both were questioned by Chicago detective Kenneth Boudreau. The Tribune reported in 2001 that Boudreau had helped to get confessions from more than a dozen defendants in murder cases in which charges were dropped or the defendant was acquitted.
First Assistant State’s Atty. Robert Milan stated Monday that it would be too time-consuming to look at all the Boudreau cases, that time is better spent looking for other cases with problems. But if the string of questionable cases linked to Boudreau is not a red flag, it’s hard to say what is.
“We don’t know exactly what happened” in the case of Hill and Young, Milan stated Monday. Wouldn’t it be encouraging if he had ended that thought with, “… but we intend to find out.”
