A confidential report by special prosecutors assigned to review a decades-old murder slams an initial assessment of the case by the Cook County state’s attorney’s wrongful convictions unit, saying it failed to look into “the integrity of the police investigation.”
“This case presents a microcosm of the many ways in which a police investigation into a serious violent crime can fail,” the special prosecutors wrote.
Nancy Adduci, the former director of the Conviction Integrity Unit, had said she found nothing wrong with the prosecution of Kevin Jackson for the murder of another man at a West Side gas station in 2001.
Jackson was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He is appealing his conviction, alleging misconduct by Chicago police investigators, including coercing of witness statements.
Adduci reported in a 2020 memo that after a “thorough” and “complete” review of Jackson’s conviction, “nothing requires a change of … course” and “this matter requires no further review.”
But two years later, special prosecutors were appointed to re-examine the case after it came to light that a former assistant state’s attorney in the integrity unit was married to a detective in Jackson’s case.
The special prosecutors concluded the Conviction Integrity Unit appeared to have done little more than a cursory review, and “there remains powerful evidence that Jackson may be innocent.”
The unit “essentially appears to have considered only whether the trial record contained legally sufficient evidence upon which a jury could base a guilty finding,” the report stated.
Adduci’s memo “focused on the credibility of the witnesses’ recantations in light of conflicts in their account” but “bypassed the question of how the witness statements were procured by the CPD and the allegations that those witnesses made about how they were treated by CPD investigators,” the special prosecutors stated.
“The CIU examined only Jackson’s actual innocence claim and disavowed any view concerning the integrity of the police investigation,” the report stated.
Adduci did not respond to a request for comment.
The special prosecutors recommended the state’s attorney’s office no longer fight Jackson’s appeal. Their findings were sent to State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and First Assistant State’s Attorney Risa Lanier last summer, but the full report has never been made public.
In a December court filing, Jackson’s attorneys wrote the state’s attorney’s office “has refused to provide an unredacted version” of the report and asked for it to be reviewed in private by the judge considering Jackson’s appeal.
A redacted copy of the report, included by Jackson’s attorneys in a court filing, shows the state’s attorney’s office withheld the report’s conclusion and specific criticisms of the integrity unit’s review.
Judge Angela Petrone has scheduled a hearing for Monday, where she is expected to rule on whether to overturn Jackson’s conviction. His appeals have focused on former Chicago Police Detective Brian Forberg, who retired last year.
Jackson has accused Forberg of coercing witnesses to make false statements implicating him. No other evidence tied Jackson to the shooting, and several witnesses recanted their statements, some before the trial.
Forberg has faced similar allegations in dozens of other cases. He was married to an assistant state’s attorney in the Conviction Integrity Unit until her death in 2022.
In reaching their conclusion, the special prosecutors wrote: “Contrary to assumptions by the CIU, the available evidence also indicates that some of the Chicago Police Department officers involved in assembling the case against Jackson have employed those same tactics in other cases.”
Adduci was forced to resign last year after she faced allegations she hid evidence from defense attorneys about the police investigation into the 2011 murder of off-duty Chicago Police officer Clifton Lewis.
Judge Petrone was assigned the case late last year because the judge who presided over Jackson’s trial has since retired. If Petrone vacates the conviction, the state’s attorney’s office has said it will not retry Jackson — sending him home to his family after more than two decades behind bars.
Jackson’s family had believed he would be home soon after they learned the state would no longer fight to keep him in prison.
But at recent hearings, relatives and supporters have complained about the slow progress of the case as they sat in the gallery of Petrone’s small third-floor courtroom, where they were separated from the proceedings by a thick wall of bulletproof glass.
Petrone has repeatedly explained, when pressed by attorneys, that she takes cases in the order she receives them and has said she will do her own thorough review even though no one is opposing the appeal.
“I need to do my own review of every single paper, every single filing … before I put my name to it,” Petrone told attorneys during a March hearing, setting off a chorus of groans in the gallery.
Petrone has previously denied motions to vacate convictions in cases that prosecutors said they can no longer support — decisions that at least twice were later overturned by the appellate court, according to reporting by Injustice Watch that appeared in the Sun-Times.
Foxx announced last year she was “rebranding” the Conviction Integrity Unit as the Conviction Review Unit and appointed a policy adviser, Michelle Mbekeani, to head the unit.
Adduci was widely respected by prosecutors at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse, and the appointment of Mbekeani, who had never worked as a line prosecutor handling criminal cases in the courtroom, ruffled feathers, particularly among some senior prosecutors.
Mbekeani resigned last week in anticipation of going on maternity leave, which would have kept her out of the office for likely much if not all of the time Foxx has left in her second term. Foxx announced last year she would not seek a third term.
