After a five-month investigation, Cook County prosecutors have decided that they will oppose a Chicago man’s request to be released from prison even though they recently agreed to free one of his co-defendants and the cases are closely linked by questionable confessions.
Attorneys for Deon Patrick, 41, had hoped prosecutors would ask Cook County Judge Jorge Alonso on Friday to throw out Patrick’s conviction for a 1992 double murder on the city’s North Side. The attorneys had even packed their car with food for the approximately six-hour drive to the maximum-security Menard Correctional Center, the southern Illinois prison where Patrick is serving a life sentence.
But Assistant State’s Attorney James Papa said prosecutors decided to oppose Patrick’s release, though he did not explain why. He told the judge that prosecutors don’t even think Patrick merits an evidentiary hearing into his claims.
“This is the most outrageous thing I have ever heard,” Stuart Chanen, one of Patrick’s lawyers, said in response during the brief hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Patrick was one of eight men who were charged in the November 1992 murders of Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook. All eight confessed and implicated one another, suggesting the cases would rise and fall together. Five of the eight were convicted and sent to prison, three of them with life sentences. In June, prosecutors agreed to the release of one of the men, Daniel Taylor, saying it was done in the interest of justice.
The Tribune investigated Taylor’s case in 2001 as part of its series “Cops and Confessions,” and uncovered evidence that buttressed Taylor’s claim that he was in the lockup at the old Town Hall police station at Addison and Halsted streets when the slayings occurred.
The newspaper also reported that one of the men who was arrested, Dennis Mixon, said he committed the crime with other people. Mixon, who is serving a sentence of life without parole, has continued to insist that Taylor, Patrick and the five others who were arrested in the case weren’t involved in the murders.
After Taylor’s release in June, the office of State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and her Conviction Integrity Unit launched an in-depth review of Patrick’s case, interviewing witnesses and others involved in the original investigation and prosecution. That investigation led to Friday’s hearing.
Chanen argued that the case against Patrick is flawed since it depended on the confessions. No physical evidence tied any of the men to the crime. Chanen said prosecutors have conceded that the case was tainted by Taylor’s undermined confession and his release from custody. He said Patrick’s attorneys have been “extraordinarily patient” while prosecutors conducted their investigation and helped making alibi witnesses and others available for questioning.
“How is it possible that they made the judgment that they had to vacate Daniel Taylor and they can’t vacate Deon Patrick?” Chanen said outside court.
In an interview this summer at Menard, Patrick said that during the initial police investigation he was repeatedly pressed to admit his role in the slayings but refused. After some of the teens who would become his co-defendants were brought into his interrogation room and he was told they had implicated him, he said he began to lose hope that his claims of innocence would be believed. After about 30 hours in custody, he signed a confession that he said a prosecutor wrote out for him.
That confession, in which Patrick said he shot Lassiter, made up the bulk of the case against him at his trial. It conflicted, however, with Taylor’s lengthy, court-reported confession in which he told police and prosecutors that Patrick shot Lassiter and Haugabook.
The broader theory of the crime was that four of the suspects went into Lassiter’s apartment while four stayed outside as lookouts. All of it was undermined by police records showing Taylor had been arrested about two hours before the murders, locked up at the Town Hall station, then released more than an hour after the killings.
Still, Alvarez’s office for years fought Taylor’s efforts to win his release before they agreed to ask a judge to throw out his conviction in late June, paving the way for his release from prison.
