The Cook County state’s attorney’s office has objected to an effort by Kevin Jackson to obtain a certificate of innocence in the case, a move that comes some 20 years after his original conviction and a year after he was ordered released from prison.
Despite the findings of another special prosecutor and the state appellate court that released Jackson, State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s office last week said evidence still points to Jackson’s guilt in a fatal 2001 shooting at a South Side gas station.
“Even though the Appellate Court found that the reinvestigation report raised enough questions about petitioner’s convictions to warrant a new trial, and even though the People elected to dismiss the charges rather than conducting a second trial, it is clear that the trial record contains significant evidence of petitioner’s involvement in the offenses,” prosecutors wrote in the Sept. 26 filing. “(Jackson) has not met his burden of proving his innocence by a preponderance of the evidence. This Court should deny the petition.”
The objection to Jackson’s petition — filed in February — was authored by another set of special prosecutors recently appointed to the case.
“It’s particularly difficult to explain given the fact that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office commissioned a reinvestigation of Mr. Jackson’s case,” one of Jackson’s attorneys, Elizabeth Bacon, told the Tribune. “No one disputes that it was lengthy, no one disputes that it was thorough. No one disputes that no evidence, new evidence linking him in any manner to this crime, was uncovered.”
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Oct. 29, court records show. A representative for Burke did not respond to a request for comment.
The prosecutors’ response to Jackson’s petition came just days after Jackson filed a federal lawsuit against the prosecutors who handled the 2001 case, as well as two detectives who investigated the killing, Brian Forberg and John Foster.
Foster is the commander of Police Department’s Area 5 detectives on the Northwest Side, a post he’s held since 2022. Forberg retired from the department in late 2023 and then started receiving monthly pension payments of more than $5,000, records obtained by the Tribune show. Six months after he retired, the Police Department rehired Forberg as a criminal intelligence research specialist, according to city employment records obtained by the Tribune.
Jackson was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the 2001 killing of Ernest Jenkins at a gas station in West Englewood.
A review of the Jackson case by a different group of special prosecutors, previously appointed to examine the evidence on behalf of the state’s attorney’s office, found that the witnesses who later recanted gave “consistent and detailed” descriptions of mistreatment by detectives who have a history of allegations of coercion.
The special prosecutors’ report noted that the state’s case against Jackson in its entirety was based on statements that witnesses gave to detectives, only to then retract at trial, alleging a number of coercive tactics.
One such witness was a pregnant woman who said the detectives threatened that she’d give birth to her child in jail and lose custody if she didn’t name their suspect, the report said. It also said detectives ignored evidence of a different perpetrator.
Any reasonable review of the case, the panel of judges said, would determine “these convictions resulted solely from coerced and false statements.”
