After a year, little progress in Burge-related case
Tainted confession tossed, but ‘nothing is going forward’
A little more than a year ago, special prosecutors announced plans to retry Gerald Reed for a 1990 double homicide even after a Cook County judge had thrown out a confession allegedly beaten out of him by Chicago police detectives working under notorious Cmdr. Jon Burge.
In the months that have followed, Reed’s supporters have continued to pack the courtroom for regular hearings, insisting on his innocence and hoping for his release after nearly three decades in custody. Prosecutors maintain they have enough evidence to convict him.
But little substantive progress has been made toward his trial, exoneration or release on bond.
“We still have a standstill,” Reed’s mother, Armanda Shackelford, told the Tribune in a telephone interview. “Nothing is going forward. We just here.”
Judge Thomas Hennelly, who took over the case in January, has complained from the bench at the Leighton Criminal Court Building that Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown’s office took nearly all of 2019 to produce a complete record of Reed’s case to allow him to get up to speed and make informed rulings.
In the meantime, Reed’s attorneys have made any number of attempts to get the charges tossed out. They spent months in a novel — and ultimately futile — effort to get different prosecutors on the case. They filed paperwork for Reed’s release on bond more than a year ago, but that motion has yet to even be argued.
Then in October, Hennelly threw a curveball that brought the proceedings to yet another halt, ruling that Judge Thomas Gainer Jr. had thrown out only Reed’s oral confession, not a separate written statement that Hennelly held could be used at the retrial. Even prosecutors appeared to be thrown for a loop by the decision.
Gainer had thrown out Reed’s conviction in December 2018 after years of legal wrangling over allegations that two detectives under Burge beat him into confessing to the fatal shootings of Pamela Powers and Willie Williams on the South Side.
Reed alleged that Detective Victor Breska kicked him so hard that he broke a rod that had been placed in Reed’s leg to aid in his healing from an earlier gunshot wound. Breska’s partner, Detective Michael Kill, who was repeatedly accused of abuse before his death in 2018, never reported the beating.
Reed was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
It was one in a litany of cases in which Burge and his “midnight crew” of detectives who worked under him have been accused of torturing or abusing dozens of mostly African American men into confessing to killings in the 1970s and ’80s. The scandal has stained the city’s reputation and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in settlements, legal fees and other compensation to victims.
Burge, who was fired from the Police Department in 1993, was convicted by a federal jury of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2010 over his denials in a lawsuit of ever witnessing torture or abusing suspects. He died in 2018 after serving 4 1⁄2 years in prison and home confinement.
Prosecutors maintain that they can prove Reed guilty in the double slaying even without the tainted confession. Two witnesses told authorities that they saw Reed and co-defendant David Turner one night in October 1990 with a terrified Powers “in their control,” barefoot and without her coat, prosecutors said in a court filing.
Reed threatened Powers, asking her where the money was, while Turner ominously warned he would “drop this b---- behind Kennedy King,” prosecutors alleged.
Early the next morning, Powers was found under a viaduct near Kennedy-King College in the Englewood neighborhood, shot in the head and naked from the waist down. The same day, police found Williams shot to death in Powers’ ransacked apartment.
Prosecutors allege that the murder weapon was a Gangster Disciples “community gun” that one of the same witnesses — a woman — saw Reed and Turner carry on several occasions. Once, the witness said, she and Turner were handling the gun in the hallway, and it accidentally fired — lodging a bullet in the wall that later analysis showed was fired by the same weapon that killed Powers and Williams.
Turner, who never alleged he was beaten by police, is also serving a life sentence for the double murders.
Reed’s attorney, Elliot Zinger, said the evidence cannot be disconnected from the taint of the Burge era.
A series of outside attorneys have prosecuted Burge-related cases since 2003 after a judge found that then-State’s Attorney Richard Devine had an inherent conflict of interest since he had briefly represented Burge in private practice in the 1980s. Robert Milan, a former high-level county prosecutor now in private practice who has acted as special prosecutor since 2017, has led the effort to force Reed to a second trial.
Reed’s attorneys tried to remove Milan from the case, saying State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office had no such conflict and should take over the prosecution.
At a court hearing before Presiding Judge LeRoy Martin Jr. of the court’s Criminal Division, Milan shot back against what he called a blatant attempt to get a more favorable prosecutor.
If the evidence against Reed hadn’t held up without his confession, Milan said he would have dropped the charges just as he has in several other cases.
Zinger acknowledged that the effort stalled proceedings for months but said Reed agreed that it was the right tactic.
Martin rejected Zinger’s arguments last summer that special prosecutors cannot handle retrials but found that Foxx’s office was far enough removed from the stain of the Burge era that it could start handling certain Burge-related cases. However, Reed has been in custody too long to assign a new prosecutor and risk further delays, Martin ruled.
In the meantime, Shackelford, Reed’s 77-year-old mother, has come to nearly every one of her son’s court hearings except when health issues interfered. Each time, she’s hoped for progress — and her son’s release after 29 years in custody.
“I’ve cried, and I’ve cried thinking something good was going to happen …” she said, then sighed. “It just gets very frustrating, but I’m not giving up.”