Two brothers whose murder convictions were overturned after claiming they were beaten into confessing have filed federal lawsuits accusing Chicago police detectives of framing them out of revenge.
Reginald Henderson and Sean Tyler, who both spent 25 years in prison, contend detectives targeted them because Tyler testified for the defense in a case they handled in 1991.
In that 1991 murder case, the suspect, a 13-year-old boy, was acquitted after claiming he was tortured by police.
Two years later, the lawsuits say, Henderson was arrested and tortured by the same detectives and “fabricated a false confession in which he was forced to implicate Sean.”
Tyler, 17 at the time, was then taken into custody and beaten “so severely in the chest, face and eyes that he was later taken to the hospital for vomiting blood,” according to the lawsuits.
“Scared and afraid — having never been in trouble with the law before — Sean agreed to sign whatever the officers wanted,” the lawyers said. “Based on their fabricated and false confessions, Henderson and Tyler were wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to decades in prison in 1995.”
Henderson and Tyler served their entire sentences while motions to overturn their convictions were pending. In September 2021, after they had been paroled, prosecutors agreed to vacate their convictions and eventually dropped all charges.
But the state’s attorney’s office has opposed granting the two men certificates of innocence, which would formally remove records of their arrest and charges and entitle them to counseling and a payout of as much as $200,000 from a state fund for people wrongfully convicted.
In the years since Tyler and Henderson were put on trial, several witnesses have recanted their testimony, and lawyers for the pair point out, dozens of defendants have made similar claims of torture by the detectives who handled the case.
But prosecutors have pointed to a woman who told defense lawyers that police told her to identify Tyler and Henderson and paid her $1,100 to move from the neighborhood. She has since said told investigators that her testimony was true.
In filings in the case, lawyers for Tyler and Henderson claim detectives Kenneth Boudreau and James O’Brien, now retired, targeted the brothers because Tyler had testified for the defense in the case of a 13-year-old boy who claimed he confessed to a 1991 murder after he was beaten and shocked by the two detectives and others working for disgraced former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge.
Tyler had witnessed the shooting, and his testimony led to the boy’s confession being barred from the case and to his acquittal.
In 1993, Boudreau and O’Brien arrested Henderson, then 18, and Tyler, 17, in the murder of Rodney Collins, allegedly pinning the case on the brothers by beating witnesses who identified the brothers and guiding a neighbor who witnessed the shooting to name the pair as suspects.
Henderson claims he was punched repeatedly and left handcuffed in an interrogation room without food or access to a bathroom, and he eventually signed a confession after more than 48 hours in custody. His brother was arrested the next day, and he said he also was beaten before confessing.
At each of the brothers’ trials, detectives denied abusing them or other suspects, but in the ensuing decades allegations of torture by police who worked under Burge have increasingly been taken as fact by judges in dozens of cases.
The state’s Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission in 2020 ruled that Tyler’s claims of abuse were worthy of review by a judge. The commission dismissed a request for review of Henderson’s claims in 2021 because his conviction already had been reversed.
The Chicago Police Department moved to fire Burge in 1993. In 2008, Burge was charged with lying under oath about the abuse of suspects when questioned for lawsuits brought by men claiming they were tortured by him or his detectives. Burge was convicted in 2010 of perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to 41⁄2 years in prison. He died in 2018.
At a news conference Tuesday in the lobby of the Dirksen Federal Courthouse, Tyler and Henderson stood with their attorneys alongside an easel displaying funeral programs for nearly a dozen loved ones who died during their decades in prison.
“I want people to look at our history and our hurt,” Henderson told reporters, choking up as he spoke. “I left (for prison) with a 5-month-old child, and came home to three grandkids, people (for whom) I’ve never been a part of their lives.”
Henderson’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, noted that Henderson’s lawsuit names former Assistant State’s Attorney Virginia Bigane as a defendant, claiming the prosecutor fabricated a statement and was complicit in framing Henderson and Tyler.
“You realize that it’s not just bad police officers, it’s an entire system that backs them up and allows them to do what they do,” Bonjean said.
