Exonerated: Five More Innocent Prisoners

by Moe White

Scarcely a month after the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia for a crime of which he was almost certainly innocent, the online newspaper The Root (www.theroot.com) reports that prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) have vacated the convictions of three young men who were serving time for a 1991 murder they did not commit.

Two other men, who have already finished serving their time in the same case, will have their convictions dismissed, and, theoretically, all five will have their records cleared.

The five youths became known as the “Dixmoor Five,” and when they
were convicted three of them were 14 years old, the other two, 16. They
were charged with raping and murdering Cateresa Matthews, who
disappeared Nov. 19, 1991, and was found dead three weeks later, killed
with a single gunshot and left in a field near I-57.

It was
nearly a year after the unsolved crime that police arrested the five
boys. Though neither semen nor DNA matched any of the teens, three
confessed under pressure from police and implicated the other two. Two
then pleaded guilty in exchange for reduced sentences, and the young men
have been imprisoned for as much as 10 years each.

According to
the Chicago Tribune, “In a new round of DNA tests last month, a lab was
able to isolate a single genetic profile from the swabs taken at the
time of the rape and murder. When the Illinois State Police uploaded it
into a database, it matched the DNA profile of a man who was 33 at the
time of the 1991 murder. At the time, he had already been convicted of a
sexual assault and recently paroled near where Matthews lived….”

Nearly
65,000 members of ColorOfChange.org had signed petitions demanding that
the convictions be vacated. Executive director Rashad Robinson said,
“We are relieved by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s
decision to vacate these convictions.”

Referring as well to “The
Englewood Five,” another group of five youth apparently exonerated,
Robinson continued, “DNA evidence has proven the innocence of all 10
black men who were only children when they were forced by Illinois
police to confess to murders they didn’t commit. This is an opportunity
for Alvarez to make it clear that forced confessions and wrongful
convictions have no place in law enforcement.”