This story is a collaboration between Injustice Watch and Bolts, a nonprofit publication that covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments.
Key takeaways
- A certificate of innocence is a court order declaring that a person who has been convicted of a crime is innocent. In Illinois, they come with modest state compensation and the ability to get the case removed from court records. Civil rights attorneys also use them in police misconduct lawsuits.
- Prosecutors don’t have to get involved, and under former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx they often didn’t. Since taking office in December 2024, State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has objected to nearly every certificate of innocence petition.
- When fighting against certificates of innocence in court, prosecutors in Burke’s office have repeatedly defended the work of former Chicago police detectives notorious for building wrongful convictions.
About a decade into his prison sentence for a murder he always said he did not commit, Tyrece Williams told his mother to stop bringing his four children to see him.
His oldest boys were teenagers by then. His appeals had failed, and it was too painful for Williams to keep lying to his kids that he’d be home soon. So he watched them grow into adults through pictures his family mailed him.
Williams was finally released in 2009, after finishing his term for the 1990 murder in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. His mother, who kept a bottle of champagne she planned to open the day he walked free, died before that day came.
But even after he went free, he kept trying to clear his name. He eventually found lawyers to make his case, and last year a Cook County Circuit Court judge threw out his conviction, citing testimony that a notoriously corrupt police detective beat the key witness into identifying Williams.
This is the third part in “Denying Innocence,” our series on the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s approach to innocence claims.
Now he wants a judge to formally declare he’s not a murderer by granting him a certificate of innocence. As ordinary-looking as the first page of a mortgage, these court orders give exonerated people access to modest state compensation and the right to remove their cases from court records to make it easier to get jobs and housing. And civil rights attorneys use them as evidence in lawsuits against the chronically abusive Chicago Police Department, which have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
But Williams, 58, said a certificate would serve a more profound purpose: finally setting him free. He said it’s particularly important to him to give his children an official document saying that what happened to their family was wrong. He’s close with his adult children, and he said through tears that he wants the certificate to show them “daddy is free, because this paper says it.”
“This would mean the world to me, because they took the world from me,” he said. “You are not free until you get that paper.”
But prosecutors under State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke are fighting to keep Williams from getting the certificate, arguing he can’t prove his innocence.
Williams’ case is emblematic of the night-and-day change Burke has brought to certificates of innocence since taking over from Kim Foxx 17 months ago, an Injustice Watch and Bolts analysis of court records found.
Foxx’s prosecutors usually took no position, objecting to only 1 out of every 4 certificates sought by people exonerated in her second term. Burke is almost the opposite: Her office has objected in 4 out of 5.
These objections turn into monthslong court battles with prosecutors that have been painful for people who already spent decades in prison and missed out on their youth, lost parents while incarcerated, and watched their children grow up without them. In interviews, eight exonerated men — some of whom have received certificates of innocence, others who are still waiting, and one whose petition was rejected by a judge — said they want the certificates for a mix of practical and profound reasons: to hand to wary employers, to display to guests in their homes, or just to force the system to admit it was wrong.
Roberto Almodovar keeps his certificate framed on the wall of his home office. He spent 23 years in prison before prosecutors dropped his case in 2017 following revelations of coercion by the detective who built it. The certificate takes the place of an apology, he said.
“They’re never gonna come out and apologize to people like us. They never do, they never will,” he said.
“They’re never gonna come out and apologize to people like us. They never do, they never will.”
Roberto Almodovar spent 23 years in prison before prosecutors dropped his case in 2017, following revelations of coercion by a detective who worked on it.
In nearly a year and a half at the helm, Burke has clearly signaled how she plans to handle innocence claims in Cook County, which has more known wrongful convictions than any other county nationwide. She has largely responded as though she sees no injustices to correct.
A previous Injustice Watch investigation in collaboration with Bolts found that Burke did not act on a host of strikingly similar claims of coercion against a Chicago detective and his partners. And after Burke inherited the already-broken Conviction Integrity Unit — a group of prosecutors tasked with reviewing whether people had enough evidence to go free — the group stopped exonerating people.
Burke recently added two attorneys to the under-resourced unit, so it now has closer to the same staffing it had in more active years under Foxx. Still, the Conviction Integrity Unit — which exonerated numerous people under Foxx — hasn’t cleared anyone since Burke took office.
Burke has declined repeated requests for interviews about her approach to innocence claims for a year and a half, and a spokesperson also turned down a request to speak with a deputy prosecutor who handles many certificate of innocence petitions. The state’s attorney’s office sent a statement that did not address detailed questions about Burke’s opposition to certificates of innocence. Burke said in the statement, “We hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards and will always follow the facts and the law to protect the people of Cook County.”
But Burke has been clear about her rationale for opposing them. Three months into her term, she publicly stated the certificates should go to people with ironclad evidence of their innocence, such as DNA. Her assistants have noted in court filings that a defendant getting a conviction thrown out doesn’t necessarily mean that person is innocent. They’ve also argued that guilty people are seeking the certificates to gain an unwarranted advantage in civil rights lawsuits.
Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie L. Mosser, president of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, said prosecutors need to look at every case individually.
“I do agree with State’s Attorney O’Neill Burke’s process now, because I think they’re doing what is just in every case, which is making sure that if a certificate of innocence is going to be granted, it is going to be based on the fact that they were actually innocent,” she said.
But numerous attorneys for exonerated people said assistant state’s attorneys had directly told them they plan to object to certificates of innocence by default.
Denying innocence nearly every time
State legislators created certificates of innocence in 2008 to address the problems exonerated people face after coming home. They have often spent decades in prison and tend to step into the world with little money, spotty employment histories, and convictions for serious crimes on their record.
A certificate of innocence comes with expungement and the right to collect state compensation based on the length of imprisonment, currently capped at just under $300,000 for people who spent 14 years or more behind bars. States vary in how they compensate the wrongfully convicted, ranging from those that offer nothing to many that pay much more than Illinois.
To get a certificate, exonerated people typically have to show a judge there is a preponderance of evidence of their innocence — meaning they’re more likely innocent than not.
Prosecutors aren’t obligated to get involved, and Foxx usually didn’t.
The state’s attorney’s office provided incomplete records in response to an open records request. Instead, Injustice Watch and Bolts built a database based on thousands of pages of court records in the cases of 211 people exonerated in Cook County since the start of 2021 listed in the National Registry of Exonerations. The data does not include everyone who sought a certificate in that period, but the registry is the most complete public list of exonerated people.
Just more than half of the exonerations belong to a special class involving former Sgt. Ronald Watts, who terrorized a South Side public housing project by planting drugs on people before he was sentenced to federal prison on corruption charges in 2013. Most of those cases have been expunged, and lawyers for those defendants said Foxx didn’t object to their certificates of innocence. In at least two cases left over when Burke took office, she didn’t object either. The analysis excluded these cases.
Beyond those, Foxx’s office objected to only 14 certificates of innocence — or 25 percent — sought by people exonerated during her second four-year term.
Burke, on the other hand, has objected in 23 cases — or 82 percent — in which her office has taken a position during the past year and a half. A few people got certificates without resistance early in her term, but Burke has objected to every pending case in which prosecutors have stated a position.
Cases predictably take longer when prosecutors object: Across both administrations, uncontested cases took about six months on average, while contested ones took nearly a year.
And it remains unclear what results Burke’s office will get. Even when prosecutors objected, judges have almost always granted the certificates anyway. Records show judges denied only three certificates to men cleared over the past five years.
Burke explained the change in approach to the Chicago Tribune last year, saying certificates are appropriate for people who have “concrete, irrefutable evidence” such as DNA. “There’s a lot of daylight between ‘We can’t prove the case again’ and ‘You’re innocent,’” she said.
But demanding slam-dunk physical evidence would exclude the wide majority of exonerated people. Only about 12 percent of wrongful convictions in Cook County have involved DNA, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Innocence claims in Cook County instead tend to revolve around witnesses recanting earlier statements and allegations of police abuse.
Burke’s standard could lead to courts denying deserving people certificates, said Bennett L. Gershman, a law professor at Pace University in New York and an expert on prosecutorial ethics and misconduct.
“That word ‘irrefutable,’ that’s a pretty strong word. There’s probably going to be few, if any, certificates of innocence given out if that’s your standard,” he said. “Everything is refutable.”
Money plays an important role in the dispute over certificates of innocence.
Foxx’s stance toward certificates was frustrating for some Chicago political figures who believe they hurt the city in lawsuits. Exonerations account for a substantial portion of the city’s out-of-control spending on police litigation; four months into this year, Chicago had already spent $175.6 million on lawsuits against the police.
Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot complained in a mayoral campaign forum in 2023 that Foxx was “handing out certificates of innocence like they’re candy,” and the politicians argued over the issue in text messages. And Foxx’s handling of the court orders remains a matter of controversy in active lawsuits against the police. Earlier this year, attorneys defending the city of Chicago from a lawsuit filed by two exonerated women won the right to question Foxx under oath about her decision not to object to their certificates of innocence.
Foxx declined to comment for this story.
When Burke won office, she offered a sign of her differences from Foxx by appointing Lightfoot to co-chair her transition team’s subcommittee on handling wrongful convictions.
“What they’re doing don’t make sense. … You fight people who you’re supposed to be healing. You fight people you’re supposed to be helping.”
Antonio McDowell spent 23 years in prison for murder before being exonerated. McDowell said a certificate of innocence “signifies freedom,” but prosecutors are fighting to block the court order he badly wants.
Burke’s aides have highlighted the issue in court, including in the case of Frank Burrell, who was cleared of murder in 2024 after spending 20 years in prison. At a hearing in December on his request for a certificate of innocence, Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph DiBella said the certificates were “a good idea before it became big business, which it has now.”
He noted that attorneys with the successful civil rights firm Loevy & Loevy handle both certificates of innocence and lawsuits against the police. He pressed Cook County Circuit Court Judge Tyria B. Walton to let him question Burrell under oath about the potential windfall from a federal lawsuit.
“Once you have that certificate of innocence, the judicial declaration … that forces the hand of the city and the county to settle for millions,” DiBella said.
Burrell’s attorney, David Owens, a partner at Loevy & Loevy and an attorney at its affiliated free legal clinic, The Exoneration Project, told the judge it’s ridiculous to claim a certificate would lead to “money coming out of the sky” and added that arguments about separate lawsuits were beside the point.
“It’s just so irrelevant and such a waste of time. We should focus on the merits of this case,” he said.
Walton ruled that the prosecutor would be allowed to ask Burrell about his lawsuit, though she added, “I don’t know how relevant it is.”
(Disclosure: Loevy & Loevy represents Injustice Watch in public records lawsuits, including against the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.)
There are no studies or publicly available data showing whether or how much a certificate of innocence helps a plaintiff in a civil suit, though city officials have taken note of them while explaining decisions to settle litigation. Lawyers for exonerated people said they don’t think the certificates have a substantial effect on lawsuits and noted that Chicago has a history of losing huge sums of money even when the plaintiffs lack them. Last year, a federal jury awarded $120 million to two men who each spent 16 years behind bars. The men got certificates of innocence only after winning the lawsuit.
Attorney Jennifer Blagg, who has won numerous exonerations, said her clients never consider that a certificate might aid in a lawsuit. They want their modest payouts from the state, and to have their losses acknowledged, she said. She pointed to a client who spent years in solitary confinement.
“And you mean to tell me that his certificate of innocence is just about so he can have a civil lawsuit?” she said. “My God. It’s very deeply offensive to me to think that that’s all it’s about.”
Kevin Jackson, an exonerated man who is fighting for a certificate of innocence after 23 years in prison, said prosecutors should concern themselves strictly with the facts. Jackson is suing police and prosecutors.
“They’re not required to save money. They’re required to seek justice,” he said.
Defending work by notorious cops
Many of the defendants Burke has tried to block from getting certificates of innocence argue they were railroaded by Chicago police detectives with troubling records.
Burke’s office has fought 11 people sent to prison by former Detective Reynaldo Guevara, who has been accused dozens of times of beating people, extracting false confessions, and framing suspects on the Northwest Side from the 1980s to the 2000s.
Prosecutors are defending the work of a detective who often has not defended himself. Guevara has repeatedly responded to questions under oath by invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid giving testimony that could be used to prosecute him for a crime. An attorney for Guevara could not be reached for comment.
One case involving Guevara is Tyrece Williams’.
“This would mean the world to me, because they took the world from me.”
Tyrece Williams is seeking a certificate of innocence in part to give his family an official acknowledgement that what happened to them was wrong.
His case centers on a witness who recanted. Prosecutors stirred controversy during a hearing on whether Williams’ conviction should stand when they warned the witness he should talk to a lawyer before recanting under oath because the office planned to investigate him for potential perjury charges. Even after that warning, the witness testified that Guevara punched him and threw him against a wall when he said Williams wasn’t the killer.
Prosecutors defending the conviction pointed out the contradictory statements of the witness over the years, and noted that other witnesses, now dead, identified Williams.
Cook County Circuit Court Judge Carol Howard threw out Williams’ conviction last year, noting the plentiful evidence of Guevara’s misconduct and saying the other witnesses were at least a block away and no physical evidence tied Williams to the shooting. Williams has filed a lawsuit against Chicago police in federal court.
Prosecutors under Burke are now fighting Williams’ certificate of innocence and have denied in a court filing that Guevara abused the witness.
“It feels like they think police misconduct doesn’t happen,” said Lyla Wasz-Piper, one of Williams’ lawyers.
Since his release from prison 16 years ago, Williams has rebuilt his relationships with his four children and forged new ones with his four grandchildren. He reconnected with and married the mother of his children, Josie, whom he credits with raising them into successful adults. One is a Chicago police officer.
“All police are not bad,” Williams said. “I tell him like this: Treat people how you want to be treated.”
Williams said he wants prosecutors to admit fault, even if they can’t give back what he lost.
“You can’t get that back. My kids are grown. I can’t watch none of them graduate high school, grammar school,” he said. “This is what they took from me. But they don’t see it.”
Kevin Jackson’s case is another involving a detective with a troubling record of allegations. Every witness against Jackson recanted and testified either that he didn’t commit a 2001 murder on the South Side or they didn’t see it, and they alleged detectives bullied them into their statements. A surviving victim testified Jackson wasn’t the shooter.
His case is extraordinary because prosecutors under Foxx commissioned an independent investigation by outside attorneys who concluded that the witness statements were likely coerced and Jackson should go free. Their 77-page report also found that the key detective in Jackson’s case, Brian Forberg, and his partners had been accused of pressuring witnesses in at least 13 other cases, including by threatening to keep them from their children or charge them with crimes. Forberg could not be reached for comment.
But prosecutors under Burke are fighting Jackson’s certificate of innocence by arguing that there is substantial evidence of his guilt: the witness statements.
“It is clear that the trial record contains significant evidence of petitioner’s involvement in the offenses,” prosecutors wrote in a court motion.
Those arguments are being made by private lawyers — former high-ranking Cook County prosecutors Maria McCarthy, Fabio Valentini and Alan Spellberg — whom Burke’s office hired for this case. Valentini is known in part for helping to build the case against the Englewood Four, a group of teenagers cleared by DNA of a 1994 murder. The attorneys declined to comment.
Jackson, 44, said he’s been losing sleep over the certificate of innocence battle. He said he wants both to expunge his case and have the certificate so he can show it to prospective employers and police at traffic stops.
He also has a hope that germinated in front of a prison television: to go to the island of Bora Bora, which he learned about from the dining and travel show “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.”
“Crispy blue water, sunshine. I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going there when I get out,’” he said.
But he’s been struggling to get a passport. He suspects federal officials are giving him a hard time because of his record, and thinks they’d be more likely to help him if he had a certificate of innocence.
Desire and disappointment
For all its power, there are things a certificate of innocence can’t fix.
Reginald Henderson still feels deep pain over his mother’s suffering. Henderson and his brother, Sean Tyler, each spent about 25 years in prison for a South Side murder despite their allegations that they were beaten into confessions by detectives who had worked under the late Cmdr. Jon Burge, who led the torture of dozens of Black men during interrogations.
Henderson’s mother, Evie Tyler, lost much of her ability to speak after having strokes but lived to see her son released in 2020 after serving his sentence. The first video on Henderson’s cellphone camera roll shows her lighting up with elation as he surprises her by walking through the door the day he came home from prison.
She died in 2021, shortly before Foxx dropped the charges against her sons. Prosecutors under Foxx fought against the brothers’ certificates of innocence before eventually withdrawing their opposition. A judge granted them in 2024, and the brothers are suing the police.
Henderson, 50, wept as he said the certificate is a bittersweet blessing. He recalled how his mother told Tyler the police were looking for him and he should go talk to them, and how she felt responsible for their imprisonment.
“I love it. I got it. But my mother ain’t here,” he said. “Fuck that.”
It remains to be seen whether Burke’s campaign against the certificates will lead to frequent denials. But Robert Hill already knows what the consequences of that would be.
“I want to be able to live.”
Robert Hill spent a decade in prison before being freed in 2017. A judge denied his certificate of innocence petition in 2023. Because he’s afraid of getting pulled over by police, he mostly stays home. He carries a folded-up letter from his attorney explaining that he was exonerated in case he needs it.
Hill was arrested in 2007 after witnesses told police he was the getaway driver in a liquor store robbery in suburban Robbins that ended with another man wounding the store owner and killing his 27-year-old daughter. A detective told Hill he could go home if he passed a polygraph examination, but police arrested him even after he did. Hill went free in 2017 after a judge found police had violated his rights by offering him a deal to cooperate with their investigation and then breaking that agreement.
Hill sought a certificate, but Cook County Circuit Court Judge Erica Reddick credited the witness accounts and denied him. Hearing her read the order was “a hit in the chest,” he said.
Hill later settled a lawsuit with Cook County for $1.5 million, but he still feels restrained from living his life because the lack of a certificate meant he couldn’t get the case wiped off his record. As a large Black man with a murder conviction — Hill is a burly 6 feet 6 inches and known to friends as “Big Rob” — he is terrified of getting pulled over, so cars pass him constantly as he sticks to the speed limit. In lieu of a certificate of innocence, Hill, 56, carries a pouch in his pocket — a gift from his granddaughter — containing a folded-up letter from his lawyer explaining that he was exonerated.
“I don’t want to get shot, you know?” he said.
So he mostly stays at the suburban home he described as his sanctuary. He’s continuing looking for an option for expungement, because he’d like to feel safe going out into the world. He hopes to start a food truck business or one rehabbing homes. In the meantime, he’s “tiptoeing through life,” he said.
“I want to be able to live.”
Injustice Watch journalism residents Mitra Nourbakhsh and Melissa Dai contributed to this story.
Republish this article for free under a Creative Commons license.
