Still in prison after 18 years despite the flimsy evidence of his guilt, Kevin Jackson tore open the letter from the Cook County conviction integrity unit — a squad in the prosecutor’s office set up to dig into cases such as his and free the wrongfully convicted.

He was filled with hope prosecutors in the unit would see his innocence in the accounts of witnesses who recanted, the allegations of strong-arming by detectives and the surviving victim who testified Jackson didn’t pull the trigger that night in 2001 on Chicago’s South Side.

It was his second try, and this time, its leader had given him reason to think he might finally go free.

But Jackson was stunned to read yet another rejection, he recently told Injustice Watch. He remembered feeling queasy and sweaty, so shaken a prison guard let him out of his shift as a janitor. He spent that night in 2019 in his cell wondering why he had been refused again.

Three years later, on a Zoom call with his attorneys, Jackson said he found his answer. They told him they had learned a prosecutor from the conviction integrity unit, known as the CIU, was married to a detective who built his case. He broke down in tears on the call.

“That was my answer that I was looking for,” he told Injustice Watch.

The CIU’s former leader told Injustice Watch his colleague, Kirsten Ann Olson, had been walled off from the investigation because of her husband, former Detective Brian Forberg. Even so, then-State’s Attorney Kim Foxx responded by appointing lawyers from outside her office to look into the case.

The special prosecutors would later criticize the CIU for its “incomplete” investigation and call for Jackson’s immediate release. He walked out of prison in October after more than 23 years, including 12 years since he first reached out to the conviction integrity unit for help that never came.

Since its founding in 2012 as part of a national trend, the CIU has been a cornerstone of the office’s efforts to correct injustices against Black and Latinx people under Foxx and her predecessor, Anita Alvarez. Foxx, particularly, made the unit central to her reform agenda.

But the story is far more complicated than the public knows.

Jackson’s case is one of nearly two dozen suggesting serious problems with the unit’s judgement, an Injustice Watch investigation found. The unit’s frequent, celebrated moves to overturn cases have been mixed with quiet failures to address injustices, repeated conflicts of interest and investigations that cost some incarcerated people years of their lives.

Injustice Watch found 21 people, including 20 men and one woman, convicted of murder who were either rejected or left to wait years despite evidence so flawed prosecutors eventually were compelled to drop their cases.

All of them were people of color.

Collectively, records show, those people spent around 120 years in prison after the CIU first took note of their cases.

In four of those cases, CIU prosecutors had helped build the criminal case the group later reviewed or were married to someone who did, Injustice Watch found. Prosecutors from the group said they walled off colleagues with connections to cases, but those apparent conflicts still raised doubts among defense lawyers and formerly incarcerated people who said they never got a fair shot.

The conflicts arose because Foxx and Alvarez staffed the office mostly with career prosecutors and not with lawyers from outside the office.

Several defense lawyers found going to the unit a waste of time, sometimes compounded by prosecutors requiring defendants to pause their post-conviction fights in court.

The CIU was not a waste of time, however, for hundreds of others. The Foxx administration claimed the CIU exonerated more people than any similar group nationwide. In eight years under Foxx, the group exonerated 248, according to office spokespeople. Those exonerations brought last-ditch relief to people who served decades, and expedited the dismissal of cases that could have wound through the courts for years.

The wide majority of the cases tossed out under Foxx — 226 — were tied to one particularly egregious police corruption scandal centered on convicted former Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts, office spokespeople said.

Subtracting the Watts cases, the Cook County group’s record of exonerations claimed under Foxx is 22, similar to some other big-city conviction integrity units, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, an academic group established to collect nationwide data.

In an interview with Injustice Watch, Foxx said she viewed the CIU as “relatively successful” and noted the challenge of “building the plane and flying it at the same time.” She also pointed to the inherent difficulty in asking career prosecutors to police their own.

“I think, ideally, having people outside of the office staff this work, separate, apart from the rest, makes the most sense,” she said.

Foxx sympathized with the “righteous anger” among people who feel wronged by the CIU, and she expressed frustration toward a justice system — including the courts — with incentives to defend its mistakes.

“I cannot in any way be dismissive of this anger, righteous anger, that we should have got it right the first time in conviction review,” Foxx said. “I wish you hadn’t been wrongfully convicted in the first place.

“I wish we had a thorough examination of what happens in our court systems every day that allow for these men and women to be wrongfully convicted in the first place, and I would suggest that we could, but we choose not to … because the people who are wrongfully convicted are Black and brown, largely.”

The office under Foxx and new State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has denied Injustice Watch records detailing the unit’s response to each case over the years, making a full accounting of its failures and successes difficult. Injustice Watch is suing for those records.

O’Neill Burke — a former judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney who took over for Foxx after winning the seat in the November election — declined to be interviewed for this report. But another longtime prosecutor leads the unit, and O’Neill Burke has publicly touted the ability of prosecutors to police themselves.

“We have kept the exact same staff in place in the conviction integrity unit,” O’Neill Burke recently told a gathering at the Union League Club of Chicago. “They are experienced prosecutors who know exactly what they need to look for.”

Some national experts on such units disagreed with O’Neill Burke on ideal staffing.

“I think if you take somebody from inside the office, it’s just too difficult to expect, really, anyone to be able to objectively, truly evaluate their colleagues’ work,” said Rachel Barkow, a New York University School of Law professor who has studied the units.

Barkow and other experts said the CIU concept is a worthwhile — but flawed — effort to review innocence claims outside the courts.

The unit’s leader from 2017 to 2019, Mark Rotert, is the rare example of a lawyer with defense experience serving the group, and Foxx lamented his retirement after only two years. Rotert agreed the office would be better served with a mix of prosecutors and lawyers with more defense experience reviewing cases. Still, he defended his former colleagues.

“I know these people, and I have a personal belief in their integrity and their good faith,” he said.

This is a pivotal moment for Cook County’s approach to innocence claims. O’Neill Burke has signaled a tougher outlook on prosecution, and her record raises questions about her approach to innocence claims. As a young assistant state’s attorney, she prosecuted a child who was later cleared, and defense lawyers reacted angrily in December when a top deputy warned of potential perjury charges against a witness set to recant a statement.

Police corruption central to exonerations

The CIU was born under Alvarez, a career prosecutor known for taking a hard line against  innocence claims. After taking criticism for dragging her feet when five men had DNA indicating their innocence of a rape and murder, Alvarez formed the conviction integrity unit in 2012, saying it would “make sure that those in prison are there correctly.”

Alvarez did not originate the idea. Conviction integrity units popped up nationally in the 2000s as scientific advancements helped reveal thousands of wrongful convictions. Those cases showed how frequently appeals courts — known for fixing procedural errors and reluctance to second-guess jurors — failed to quickly free the innocent.

CIUs have proven to be a sometimes-awkward solution in prosecutors’ offices tasked primarily with winning and defending convictions. Prosecutors aren’t obligated to have CIUs or actively investigate their offices’ pasts. According to the exoneration registry, only about 100 of the 2,300-plus prosecutor’s offices nationwide have CIUs. Of those, some 50 had exonerated no one as of last summer, according to the registry.

Even some active ones face criticism for moving slowly. A recent investigation by New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations into CIUs throughout New York found repeated failures to correct injustices there.

Cook County is fertile ground. It has the country’s second-biggest prosecutor’s office, fed by the vast, busy Chicago Police Department, which has a long history of violently persecuting people of color. Over the last four decades, hundreds of exonerations — including those of dozens of Black men who alleged abuse or torture by former Cmdr. Jon Burge and officers tied to him — revealed widespread police abuse enabled by prosecutors.

Under Alvarez, the Cook County unit contributed to 22 exonerations from 2012 to 2016, according to the national exoneration registry. By comparison, 15 other units nationwide were involved in exonerations in those years, and most of those much smaller counties notched only a handful, per the registry. Cook County’s 22 were one fewer than prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York City. Another unusually active group in Harris County, Texas, had 124, fueled by a spate of bogus drug cases.

Alvarez did not return messages seeking comment.

Foxx took over in 2016 promising reform after voters rejected Alvarez, who had moved sluggishly to charge white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old. The unit was a stated priority for Foxx from the start, and she flew to Brooklyn to learn about its well-regarded group.

Police corruption has played a central role in the group’s many exonerations. More than 90% were tied to the Watts scandal, an office spokesperson said. The former sergeant led a team Foxx found to have routinely extorted money and planted drugs and guns on people at the Ida B. Wells Homes housing project starting in the 2000s. Lawyers for those people said the exonerations were necessary, and they’ve praised Foxx for apologizing to people hurt by those convictions.

But Foxx’s review followed the FBI’s corruption investigation, and Watts and another officer ultimately pleaded guilty to theft of government funds.

The Watts exonerations have proven to be less politically thorny than those in murder cases, which sometimes draw condemnation from police or victims’ family members. The Watts exonerees had been convicted of less serious crimes, and nearly all of them were already free. Defense attorneys sometimes referred to them as low-hanging fruit.

Foxx objected to the characterization, saying the exonerations were the result of a “yeoman’s effort,” and the convictions stood for years after Watts went to prison — until her CIU did away with them.

“It’s a felony for things they didn’t do,” she said. “If it was such low-hanging fruit, I’m curious as to why we never got them done before 2016, ’17, ’18.”

A mystery of Foxx’s time in office is the slowdown in exonerations over her final two years, when the group cleared only four people, according to Foxx. She had no certain explanation, though she noted the chaos caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and slowdown in Watts cases.

Foxx’s record on wrongful convictions goes beyond the CIU. She set up a panel featuring outside lawyers to review cases involving certain detectives with alleged involvement in wrongful convictions. And some exonerations — including many tied to disgraced former Detective Reynaldo Guevara — went through other parts of her office.

Still, her aides sometimes hyped the conviction integrity unit in ways that obscured reality.

Her office’s 66-page summary of Foxx’s service trumpeted the exoneration of Brian Beals, who walked free in 2023 after 35 years when prosecutors dismissed his 1988 murder case. The report said this highlighted the CIU’s “indispensable role … in meticulously examining cases affected by systemic issues.”

Beals’ case, however, was first referred to the unit in 2017, and the group rejected him the next year in a letter to his sister saying the evidence was “not sufficient to demonstrate that your brother, Brian Beals, is probably innocent.”

He sat in prison for five more years as his attorneys collected witness statements and other evidence indicating his innocence before prosecutors cleared him.

“I honestly have no idea what the CIU did or didn’t do, but they certainly didn’t do what we did, which was talk to people and look at the evidence,” said one of Beals’ attorneys, Lauren Kaeseberg. “If you would have done what we did, you would have come to the same conclusion.”

Some defense lawyers gave it nicknames, such as the “Conviction Confirmation Unit.” Attorney Jennifer Bonjean, an outspoken critic of prosecutors, said in the past, she agreed to allow the unit to review cases.

“Then I got f—ing burned. And so now, my answer is always, ‘No, absolutely not. Don’t touch my case. I don’t trust you,’” she said.

Still, defense lawyers said they found Foxx more receptive to innocence claims than her predecessors — or some of her colleagues.

“You had this old-school culture, and trying to persuade people who were in that old-school culture that there was a mistake, there was misconduct, there was whatever, is very difficult,” said attorney Jennifer Blagg. “If you could get it to Kim, she had a different mindset. She was not part of that culture.”

Foxx also faced competing pressure from police, their allies, and other politicians who complained she was too quick to overturn a jury’s decision. Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on the campaign trail Foxx’s office was “handing out certificates of innocence like they’re candy.” Those certificates help exonerated people sue the city, a thriving practice  costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

O’Neill Burke appointed Lightfoot to work on conviction integrity for her transition team.

‘These are their errors, after all’

The intent of the CIU was clear: It would shine a light on uncomfortable truths and fix injustices overlooked by a plodding court system.

But the unit’s judgment was often flawed.

In at least 17 instances since 2012, Injustice Watch found the unit rejected cases outright only for prosecutors to dismiss them later in the face of court losses, evidence of police misconduct, or compelling new facts.

In four others, incomplete CIU data provided to Injustice Watch didn’t clearly indicate a denial, but the records show the cases were noted by the unit, and then years passed before the people won their freedom. Fourteen spent five or more years in prison after their cases first came before the group; three spent at least another decade. Nine were rejected under Alvarez, and eight were rejected under Foxx.

In the case of Lee Harris — a Black man convicted in the high-profile 1989 murder of a woman in the upscale Gold Coast neighborhood — CIU prosecutors received bankers boxes of files in 2015, but the office data provided shows no result of their review. Eight years later, after Harris’ attorneys alleged misconduct by detectives with a history of building wrongful convictions, prosecutors finally agreed to drop the case.

Harris was free only eight months before he died of natural causes.

The 21 cases are a fraction of the CIU’s workload, as more than 600 have come before it. The 21 cases — and the unit’s responses to them — differed wildly. Some were denied after investigations, and in others, the data shows only a brief look by the CIU. In a few others, the records show defense lawyers opted for court review instead.

The common thread in all: the provided data indicates the group’s prosecutors were made aware of cases with innocence claims but denied them or left them to wait years. The incomplete records provided by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office suggest there are more cases Injustice Watch didn’t find.

Brandon Garrett, a Duke University School of Law professor who studies wrongful convictions, said it’s fair to expect prosecutors to be accountable for their mistakes.

“These are their errors, after all. It’s not like they’re going above and beyond the call of duty in addressing wrongful convictions,” he said. “It’s kind of shocking that this wasn’t always considered a fundamental part of their duty.

“No one says, ‘Oh, wow, they’re really going the extra mile at Boeing when they’re trying to figure out why planes crashed.’ No, this is actually their job.”

Rotert, the unit’s former leader, said he would sometimes read cases and think, “What I’m reading bothers the hell out of me because I question whether or not this person is truly guilty.”

“Many times when I would deny relief, I was not saying, ‘Oh, you sure are guilty, and you deserve to be there.’ I was saying, ‘I can’t be the one to bring you the relief that you’re seeking,’” he said.

“I believe, personally, a conviction integrity unit loses its justification if it becomes an office where we don’t really pay attention to what the jury and an appellate court concluded, and we have this unilateral authority to reach our own determinations.”

Allen Robinson spent 13 years behind bars for a 2008 murder on the West Side — most of those years at downstate Menard Correctional Center, or “Hell on Earth,” as he called it. The CIU noted his innocence claim in 2014 and rejected him in 2016. A judge threw out his case in 2022, and he went free.

Until he was recently informed by Injustice Watch, Robinson said, he was unaware a prosecutor who took a key witness statement in his case also served in the CIU while his case was pending. Records don’t make clear whether the unit followed its usual practice of walling her off.

“I’m not gonna get no fair shot because you’re not gonna do nothing to go against your colleagues,” Robinson told Injustice Watch. “Definitely could have been home a long, long time ago.”

His legal team kept working after his rejection, and eight years after Robinson’s case went before the CIU, Judge Mary Margaret Brosnahan cited exculpatory evidence his attorney never introduced at trial — a confession letter from another man — as she vacated the conviction. Foxx’s office then dropped the case.

Robinson, like several other people exonerated after being rejected by the CIU, filed suit against the city through the law firm Loevy & Loevy, which also represents Injustice Watch in open records lawsuits.

Glaring conflict questions

To review the office’s history, Alvarez and Foxx turned to people deeply woven into its past.

Of the 20 prosecutors Injustice Watch found who worked with the CIU since 2012, one — Rotert — had an online resume or public records showing substantial defense experience. He also served as state and federal prosecutor. The wide majority appeared to be career prosecutors. One had internships with the federal public defender’s office and the Midwest Innocence Project, according to her online resume.

The state’s attorney’s office responded to a request for a CIU roster with a document containing glaring omissions, making it difficult to firmly identify everyone connected to the group. Injustice Watch used office data, news clips, resumes, and interviews to find as many lawyers as possible linked to the CIU.

Foxx said the problem with conflicts stretches beyond just the prosecutors’ office.

“We are in conflict with people who worked in our office and are now on the judiciary, conflict with law enforcement who may have gone afoul of the law,” Foxx said. “Short of having a unit that is wholly contained of people who have never worked in that office or with those departments, I think it’s inevitable you’re gonna have trouble.”

It was a form of trouble that plagued the disturbing case against Kevin Jackson.

Jackson first reached out for relief from the CIU under Alvarez in 2012. The only evidence tying him to the shooting death of Earnest Jenkins and the wounding of another man at a gas station in 2001 were witness statements to authorities. At his 2003 trial, all four purported eyewitnesses recanted on the witness stand and either testified Jackson didn’t do it or they didn’t see it. In addition, the surviving victim also testified Jackson was not the shooter.

Prosecutors responded by pressing witnesses on their earlier statements implicating him, winning a conviction.

Jackson’s unsuccessful appeals noted how the witnesses said police had bullied and threatened them. And  Forberg now faces allegations he pressured witnesses into false statements in other cases. Forberg, who retired in 2023, declined to comment to Injustice Watch.

The CIU first rejected Jackson in 2013, but his attorneys — Elizabeth Bacon and Brandon Clark — were optimistic the second time. Even the CIU’s leader, Rotert, was troubled by the facts and told the attorneys during his review he would never have charged Jackson. But Rotert retired before the CIU decided the case.

“I still have regret that I didn’t conclude the investigation myself,” he told Injustice Watch.

Rotert’s successor, career prosecutor Nancy Adduci, was leading the CIU in 2019 when it rejected Jackson the second time. A two-paragraph letter from the CIU to his legal team did not detail its rationale but said there was “not sufficient evidence providing clear and convincing proof that your client is probably not guilty.”

In spring 2022, Bacon and Clark learned of the marriage between Forberg, the detective in Jackson’s case, and CIU prosecutor Olson, a potential conflict of interest known to her CIU bosses for years, records show.

Rotert said Olson, who died in May 2022, was walled off from the case.

Jackson’s attorneys said the conflict can’t be fixed by benching one lawyer in a unit of fewer than 10 people.

“I have four, five, six co-workers that I like and whose spouses I wouldn’t want to investigate,” Clark said. “It’s a clear conflict.”

After Jackson’s attorneys exposed the potential conflict, Foxx appointed special prosecutors Thomas Geraghty and Robert Owen, who criticized the unit’s investigation in their written report, saying once Rotert handed off the task to colleagues, it “did not continue with the same vigor.” Prosecutors didn’t interview some witnesses and had cursory talks with police.

Jackson walked free in October after prosecutors finally relented and the appellate court vacated his conviction. He spent his first holidays in decades with his family.

“When you are innocent and you know you are innocent, that alone just gives you hope,” he said. “No matter how many times I was rejected … I always had hope that one day I would be walking out of prison.”

Both his attorneys left the experience disillusioned with the unit they labeled “window dressing.”

“I think it’s actually worse than just failing in its mission because I think it raises the hopes of both the incarcerated and their families that, in fact, somebody’s looking at an actual innocence claim,” Bacon said. “It actually hurts the community it’s supposed to serve, and I think it’s a waste of taxpayer money.”

Another potential conflict of interest at the CIU involved Adduci, who led the unit when it rejected Jackson.

In 2001, as a felony review prosecutor, Adduci handwrote a confession from Carl Reed, who was charged with fatally stabbing a man on the North Side. Police held him in an interrogation room for 55 hours, his attorneys alleged. They also accused officers of physically abusing Reed, who they said had psychiatric and cognitive problems and was illiterate.

One of the detectives who interrogated Reed was Richard Zuley, who has since been repeatedly accused of coercion and abuse. Zuley also served the U.S. Navy interrogating detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where he led the brutal interrogation of a terrorism suspect, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Adduci testified at a pretrial hearing Reed did not complain of coercion and appeared literate. He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27 years. She did not return messages for comment.

Reed’s attorneys contacted the CIU in 2017 when Adduci was a supervisor in the group, records show. She took over the group as Reed’s case was pending. Office records show Adduci was walled off from Reed’s review, which does not satisfy his attorneys.

“That’s a pretty big ask for someone to make that determination about their boss,” attorney Lauren Myerscough-Mueller said.

Under Adduci’s leadership of the group, it rejected Reed in 2020. A few months later, Gov. JB Pritzker commuted Reed’s sentence with support from Foxx’s office, and he went free.

With Reed out of prison, his legal team filed a petition noting Zuley’s record, forensic testing pointing away from Reed, and an expert opinion saying he was vulnerable to coercion. The evidence was nearly the same as when the CIU reviewed the case, according to another of Reed’s attorneys, Kaeseberg.

Prosecutors dropped the case in May 2023, six years after Reed turned to the unit.

“It just delayed justice for Carl and increased his time in prison,” Myerscough-Mueller said.

Adduci spent the end of her career as a prosecutor at the center of controversies. Foxx fired her after the special prosecutors filed their report on the Jackson case and allegations she hid evidence from men who were later cleared in the murder of a police officer.

In turn, Adduci filed a lawsuit claiming Foxx discriminated against her because she’s a white woman in her 50s. The prosecutor’s office had yet to respond to the suit in court as of mid-February, and Foxx declined to discuss the case.

Michelle Mbekeani took the job in 2023 after serving as a policy adviser to Foxx, and she left six months later after a firestorm over her involvement with a website designed to connect people in prison with defense lawyers. Mbekeani could not be reached for comment.

The unit is now led by Iris Ferosie, a longtime prosecutor and veteran of the group. She declined to comment.

Jackson joins protest of new top prosecutor

Demands for an aggressive review of the past echoed among the 10 or so protesters — including Jackson — huddled in the cold outside O’Neill Burke’s Union League Club of Chicago appearance in January.

They called for the release of those claiming innocence. Speakers rasped through a bullhorn, chanting “Eileen Burke, get to work!” and held a banner reading, “Free all incarcerated survivors of police torture and wrongful conviction.”

“She’s either gonna be with us, or she’s gonna be out of a job,” said Merawi Gerima, an organizer with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Luncheon guests, mostly white, glanced at the protesters, mostly Black, while hustling inside for a meal in a hall of elegant wood accents and crystal chandeliers. O’Neill Burke drew polite applause by promising a tougher approach to shoplifting and gun crimes, vowing to be fair, and follow the law. The Q&A session eventually turned to her approach to innocence claims.

Asked onstage by her interviewer about the concerns of the protesters, she said, “Nothing has changed. We are continuing our conviction integrity unit.”

Northwestern University journalism residents Kristen Axtman, Sara Stanisavic, and Eva Putnam contributed to this report.

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