Chicago, IL – The courtroom was packed February 14. This was my fourth Gerald Reed court hearing. Usually, there is a crowd of folks who show up to support Gerald and his mother, Armanda Shackleford, who has been fighting for her son since he was arrested, tortured and framed in 1990. Shackleford sits in the front row, wearing her Free Gerald Reed t-shirt. Together we sit for an hour, two hours, three, and hear powerful men debate the innocence of a man whose sentence was vacated a year ago.

But today was different. Two alderpersons were there, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez and Jeanette Taylor, to show their support. They joined 100 supporters of the campaign, even on the coldest day of the year, an unforgiving four degrees Fahrenheit. The word had gotten out in a big way. The movement had drawn a line in the sand to demand the court free Gerald Reed.

There should be no need for this fight. Judge Thomas Gainer already overturned Reed’s conviction in December 2018, finding that the only case against Reed was his confession that was extracted using police torture. Reed is in jail, but he can legally vote. He is kept there while the new judge, Thomas Hennelly, and special prosecutor Robert Milan determine if they can charge him again.

In court, Milan tries to weave together a version of Reed cast in shadows, a vision of a heartless murderer. Then Elliot Zinger, the defense attorney, will explain that the story Milan tells is unsupported by any real evidence. Throughout this year of proceedings, the real Gerald sits in court in his wheelchair, having been disabled by torture 29 years earlier.

Today Judge Hennelly entered around 9:30 a.m., a prompt 30 minutes late to his own hearing, and spoke about the extra research he’d been doing as of late.

“I reviewed the minutes from the TIRC decision. I don’t think that the TIRC would have any objection to me playing the recording here.” The TIRC is the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, a commission appointed by the governor to hear the cases of those who have been tortured by the police.

In the understated drama of the court, a man in a steel grey suit pressed play on a laptop connected to a large speaker. The audio struck up immediately, loud enough for the entire court to hear. I recognized the voice as Rob Olmstead, executive director of the TIRC. He was reviewing the medical records for Reed.

“This seems like a pretty obvious case. The metal rod in his leg was broken, there’s no evidence that it was like that before he was arrested, and it wasn’t broken while he was in jail,” he said. “And believe it or not, the rod still hasn’t been repaired.” His voice skipped up at the end of his sentence, communicating his incredulity. The rod was not repaired for 28 years. Reed had one surgery on it recently. He has yet to receive a needed second surgery, which is why he remains wheelchair-bound.

Olmstead’s focus on Reed’s torture seemed like a great sign. We were basically listening to the TIRC build the case for Gerald’s release. Maybe Hennelly is finally buckling. It is Valentine’s Day, after all.

“It doesn’t seem he’s the most credible witness in the world,” Olmstead said. Hennelly nodded when this part of the recording played. Uh oh.

The recording eventually ended, and Hennelly told the court, “The commission was as confused and perplexed as anyone else.” A strange statement to make, considering the decision to find Reed’s claim of torture credible was a rare unanimous decision by the TIRC.

Hennelly then pronounced that a discrepancy in the ruling of Judge Gainer allowed him a new verdict of Reed’s guilt. He referenced a recent denial of an appeal of innocence by another torture survivor, George Anderson. In it, Judge William Hooks wrote a diabolical 57-page order that Anderson was falsely claiming to have been a torture victim. Despite the TIRC finding Anderson’s claim to be credible, Hooks likened Anderson to a “ghost rider” trying to get in on a lawsuit by jumping on a bus after it has been hit by a car. Hennelly saw that decision and finally found what he’d been looking for the last 14 months: a racist, pseudo-logical excuse to throw a man’s life away.

“Gerald Reed, your ride on the Jon Burge torture bus is coming to a screeching halt,” he said. “I turn you over to the Department of Corrections to carry out the rest of your life sentence.” He gave a cavalier bang of his gavel. And it was over.

At 10:30 a.m. on Valentine’s day, Judge Hennelly sent Gerald Reed back to prison to serve out a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit.

“Whaaat?” I could hear the voice of Mark Clements, longtime activist and survivor of police torture himself, carry through the room. “This is racist,” said Mark. “This is so racist!”

As the bailiffs cleared the court room, people were sobbing. “We have to throw out this entire system,” an older Black woman said while we waited for the elevators. “We have to get rid of this entire thing.”

On the first floor, Brian Ragsdale of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression began to chant in a thunderous voice, “Free Gerald Reed!”

“Free Gerald Reed!” We shouted back as the bailiffs tried to shush us. “Free Gerald Reed!” For once, those whispering hallways held the voices of those who had been silenced for far too long.

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PoliticalPrisoners #PoliticalRepression #civilianPoliceAccountabilityCouncilCPAC #JudgeThomasHennelly #GeraldReed

In one of the cases, that of Gerald Reed, Hennelly is deciding whether a man tortured by the infamous Jon Burge police crew – tortured to the point of having his leg broken – and tried solely on the basis of a false confession should be subjected to the injustice of a second baseless trial, after his original sentence was vacated. In the other, he is deciding whether evidence of wrongdoing warrants a special hearing for Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, two brothers who were framed by Detective Reynaldo Guevara, who has had 20 convictions tossed so far.

Burge and Guevara are the two most infamously abusive and corrupt cops in modern Chicago history, the twin terrors of police crimes in Chicago, accused of torturing, framing and wrongfully convicting hundreds of Black and brown men. Two cases involving the CPD’s most offensive stains and one judge who could change the course of so much, a judge whose very election to the bench is tainted by an attempted cover-up of a racist act.

Who is Judge Thomas Hennelly? Is he an impartial arbiter of the law, ruling from the rarified air of the bench, cozily removed from the slime and the muck of police and prosecutorial corruption? Hardly.

Elected to the circuit court in 2005, Hennelly is part of the small club that rules over criminal justice in Chicago. He was at the heart of the prosecutor’s office under Richard Devine that used torture confessions taken by Detective Burge and his crew. He started out in the Felony Review office and eventually became a supervisor in the Gang Crimes Unit. After leaving Gang Crimes, Hennelly became Chief Deputy of the Special Prosecutions office.

In that role, Hennelly’s boss at the time was a man named Robert Milan – a former prosecutor with his own disturbing approach to criminal justice, including defending a CPD detective with a voluminous history of abuse allegations and personally sitting with police to take confessions from the Dixmoor Five, a group of teens who were subjected to hours of intimidation before falsely confessing to rape and murder. Though wrongfully convicted, all five were exonerated years later on the basis of DNA evidence found at the scene, which came from a known serial rapist.

Milan has also called for the military occupation of entire Black neighborhoods in Chicago, with entrances sealed off, military check points erected, drones overhead filming residents’ every move, and 8000 National Guard troops sent in to patrol the streets of the South and West sides. “I’m here to help these poor people who are poverty-stricken and living in rough places,” Milan said of his plan. “When you start using words like ‘occupy’ or ‘militarize’ or ‘tanks rolling down the street’ – when you package it that way, you’re gonna get a lot of pushback. The way this thing should be packaged is: protection, protection, protection…”

Milan’s relationship with Hennelly epitomizes what is wrong with the justice system in Chicago. Because of conflicts of interest that tainted the entire prosecutor’s office under former State’s Attorney Richard Devine – who had personally represented Jon Burge – the court assigned the cases to a special prosecutor, but declined to take these cases away from Cook County judges, 198 of whom were former prosecutors.

But in Gerald Reed’s case, the special prosecutor assigned to the case is none other than Robert Milan, Hennelly’s former boss and the career Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) who prosecuted men tortured by Burge and rose to become the chief deputy of the entire prosecutor’s office under Richard Devine. And now Milan comes to court day after day asking his former employee to keep Gerald Reed in prison. So far, Judge Hennelly is letting him. For over a year, Hennelly has allowed his former boss to delay and obfuscate, even granting Milan a continuance because he didn’t bother to read a motion Reed had submitted in advance.

Gerald Reed’s case is not the first time Milan and Hennelly have worked together to keep an innocent man behind bars. During their time as prosecutors, the two men fought to keep Aaron Patterson in prison even after ample evidence of his torture by Detective Jon Burge came to light. Patterson was sentenced to death, but eventually exonerated by Governor Pat Ryan because the evidence showed that Milan and Hennelly had built a case that rested entirely on a false confession.

Hennelly’s pattern of denying police torture is well-documented, including in the case of Kevin Murray, who – like Gerald Reed – was convicted on the basis of a forced confession and whose torture claim was upheld in 2017 by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Review Commission (TIRC). Hennelly, then an ASA trying to prosecute Murray, sought to cast the victim as a liar. Commenting on Murray’s claims of being tortured into confessing by CPD Detective Kriston Kato, Hennelly told the Chicago Tribune, “You are getting a parade of murderers who come in and say Kato is a beater,” adding, “It's a lot of nonsense.”

In 2002, a CPD detective blew the whistle on Kato to Internal Affairs, documenting how he elicited a false confession from a suspect in a rape case, hitting the homeless man with such force that the whistleblower thought the man would likely die from the blow. Despite being accused for decades of torturing suspects, the CPD treated Kato as a miracle detective who could find suspects willing to confess within days of taking up old cases. To date, five murder convictions based on confessions he obtained have been overturned because of torture evidence.

Maybe the most disturbing part about Hennelly’s story is how he became a judge in the first place. As a prosecutor, Hennelly had committed a Batson violation, an egregious constitutional violation that involves striking minority jurors on the basis of their race in order to ensure an all-white jury. (Batson violations have been in the national spotlight of late, due to the case of Curtis Flowers.)

Thomas Hennelly and his partner in the prosecutor’s office, John Hynes, struck all but one of the Black jurors from their case for no reason other than their race. They tried to hide their racist action, but an Illinois Appellate Court was unconvinced of their defense and overturned the conviction of Johnny Walls and Charles Byrd as a result, citing a Batson violation. But Hennelly never disclosed this fact when applying to become a judge, something noted by the Chicago Council of Lawyers in their evaluation of him: “The Council is troubled, however, that [Hennelly] determined that it was not necessary to disclose on his judicial evaluation application that he was involved earlier in his career in a case where a Batson violation was found by a reviewing court.” Hennelly’s partner was the subject of an Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) investigation following a series of Chicago Tribune articles that revealed that he, too, failed to disclose this Batson violation when he applied for a judgeship, years before Hennelly. In Hennelly’s case, no investigation was ever launched, and he sailed into office.

Given Hennelly’s pattern of suppressing torture evidence and denying the accused their constitutional rights to justice, are we to simply assume he has now found an impartiality and fairness he failed to display as a prosecutor?

This year, Chicagoans will decide whether to re-elect State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who has explicitly decided to take the prosecutor’s office down a different path, away from its besmirched legacy, by undoing the work of men like Burge and Guevara and Hennelly and Milan. In total, Foxx has exonerated over 70 wrongfully convicted prisoners. But with the likes of Hennelly and Milan continuing to operate the system from both sides of the bench, we can’t just hope that legacy will be undone. Instead, we have to organize and demand that Hennelly and Milan and the others like them – who have aided, abetted, covered up, and profited from the torture and egregious violations of Black and brown men – are kept far from the operation of justice in this city, where they have no place.

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PoliticalRepression #ChicagoPoliceDepartment #JonBurge #JudgeThomasHennelly