Authorities have portrayed William Fillyaw as a violent criminal, a man capable of bursting into an unsuspecting woman’s apartment and shooting her.
Fillyaw and a co-defendant were eligible for the death penalty in the slaying of 28-year-old Lasondra Shaw in her North Chicago apartment in June 2007. Prosecutors said a shotgun-toting Fillyaw and accomplice Johnny Parker, gripping a pistol, kicked in her door and shot Shaw and two guests. She died of a shotgun blast in her neck.
The two men, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder each, took their cases to trial in April 2009. A week later, a Lake County jury found them both guilty, and both men were sentenced to 75 years in prison.
But now Fillyaw and Parker will have a chance at freedom.
Appeals judges recently erased Fillyaw’s convictions, agreeing that the trial’s fairness was tainted by his lawyer’s “unprofessional” work. The judges wrote that defense lawyer James Schwarzbach failed to correctly object to damning evidence against his client: the statement of a police informant who said Fillyaw admitted to the killings.
Parker’s conviction also was reversed, as the appeals judges ruled that the statement’s admission violated his constitutional rights.
The overturned verdicts are noteworthy, legal experts said, because it is unusual for appeals judges to reverse a conviction based on ineffective counsel. In this case, they said, Schwarzbach appeared to misunderstand a fundamental rule of evidence. But the trial judge and prosecutors also failed to head off the mistake, compounding the problem, they noted.
The trial was a “train wreck” of errors by prosecutors, the judge and Fillyaw’s defense lawyer, said Steven Beckett, director of Trial Advocacy at the University of Illinois College of Law.
“I should take this (case) and turn it into a law school exam,” he said.
Schwarzbach, an experienced defense lawyer, declined to comment beyond saying Fillyaw has rehired him for the retrial.
Parker, 28, has been returned to the Lake County Jail from state prison, while records showed Fillyaw, 33, remained in the Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois. Prosecutors say they plan to retry the two men, and it appears that neither man would be freed pending trial.
Parker’s attorney at the first trial, Gregory Nikitas, said any bond amount that might be set would likely be too high for Parker to pay.
Fillyaw would remain jailed regardless, as records show he has at least three years left on a sentence for armed violence, a charge he incurred when he was caught with a gun and crack cocaine during his arrest on the murder charge.
Problems with the trial, the appeals court wrote, centered on a crucial piece of evidence: a written statement from a heroin-addicted jailhouse informant. The informant told police that Fillyaw told him that he and Parker had robbed and shot three people.
The informant recanted before trial, testifying that he made up the statement in hopes of being released from jail. Despite that, prosecutors moved to admit the written statement, and Chief Judge Victoria Rossetti entered it as substantive evidence — the kind of evidence used to prove a fact. In this case, the statement was intended to show that Fillyaw had admitted to the killings and implicated Parker.
The statement was “without doubt” inadmissible as substantive evidence because the informant had no “personal knowledge” of the killing, as required by state law, the appeals judges wrote.
Schwarzbach objected to the statement, but not on proper grounds, the judges ruled, noting the lawyer’s “apparent unfamiliarity” with the evidence law.
“This is a real mistake,” said Richard Kling, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
The appeals court singled out Schwarzbach, but Kling and other legal experts also criticized prosecutors and Rossetti. The judge could have blocked the inadmissible evidence, even without a lawyer’s objection, law professors said. And the prosecutors could have avoided introducing the evidence, they said.
Patricia Fix, chief of the Lake County state’s attorney’s office’s felony trial division, said prosecutors Victor O’Block and Ryan Koehl “put much thought into how to try this case.”
Fix said prosecutors introduced the statement because the informant would have witnessed Fillyaw making his confession. Prosecutors felt the informant therefore had firsthand knowledge of the statement, making it admissible, Fix said.
Law professors also said the judge should have split the case into two trials, as the defense lawyers requested before trial. That might have prevented the evidence from souring Parker’s trial, they said.
Rossetti could not be reached for comment, but Fix said decisions on evidence and splitting trials are “not always black and white.”
Fix said, however, that the two men are unlikely to be tried together again.
