Muckraking AlterNet Coverage Exposes Wrongful Incarceration

On Thursday, January 14th, Michael Tillman walked out of the Cook County Courthouse and headed straight for Mac Arthur's Restaurant, a soul food institution on Chicago's West Side.

After 23 years of being wrongfully incarcerated and facing a life behind bars, the barbeque ribs tasted particularly sweet.

About an hour earlier, Cook County Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan had dismissed the original 1986 murder, rape and kidnapping charges that had kept Tillman locked away in Illinois prisons since he was 21. Those charges were based on a confession that Tillman says was tortured out of him by officers under the command of former Chicago Police Detective Jon Burge. Prosecutors declined to bring new charges against Tillman and, after attorneys faxed some paperwork to the Illinois Department of Corrections, he was free to go.

It was a long road to justice, a journey that gained critical momentum after a July 2008 investigative story in AlterNet, written by Chicago-based reporter Jessica Pupovac, tipped area lawyers off to the facts of Tillman's case.

"If it weren't for the publicity that was brought to the case in the early stages, being only a couple of years ago, by AlterNet… he might still be in prison now," Flint Taylor founding partner of the People's Law Office and co-counsel in Tillman's case, told AlterNet. "The first news organization that showed interest was AlterNet, and Jessica Pupovac (whose name I can never pronounce). She not only wrote a very exhaustive article that brought a lot of local and national attention to the case, but she herself stayed in touch with Mr. Tillman."

As AlterNet reported in July 2008, Tillman's personal horror in the predawn hours of July 22, 1986, when Detectives Ronald Boffo and Peter Dignan took him to an Area 2 interrogation room and pressed him for information about the murder of 42-year-old Betty Howard, whose body had been found the day before in the apartment building overseen by Tillman.

When Tillman insisted upon his innocence, Boffo and Dignan, along with three other officers, handcuffed him to the wall, hit him in the face and punched him in the stomach until he vomited blood. During the course of what appeared to be three days, rotating pairs of officers brought him to the railroad tracks behind the station and held a gun to his head, suffocated him repeatedly with thick plastic bags, poured soda up his nose and forced him into Dumpsters outside of the apartment building, ordering him to search through the rubbish for a murder weapon until, according to Detective John Yucaitis, Tillman confessed to the crime.

At the time, Michael Tillman was 20 years old, with a 3-year-old daughter and an infant son. He was charged with first degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault and sentenced to life in prison. [For more details on Betty Howard's brutal murder and the subsequent trial of Michael Tillman and his co-defendant, Sean Bell, who was found not guilty, see AlterNet's initial coverage here.]

Three weeks after Tillman's arrest, police found two men driving Howard's stolen car, with the knife used to stab her still in the vehicle. Those men led the officers to 27-year-old Clarence Trotter, who had Howard's camera and stereo in his apartment. His fingerprints were found on a soda can at the murder scene, and evidence linked him to the gun used in her murder.

Police found no physical evidence tying Tillman to the scene, or to Trotter. Weeks later, after Tillman's case file was sealed, Trotter was also given a life sentence in a separate trial.

Tillman appealed the decision in 1999 and lost. The judge wrote in his decision that even though the corroborating evidence may only be circumstantial, it "need only tend to confirm and inspire belief in the confession."