Chicago Man’s Long-Delayed Exoneration Reveals Cracks in a System
Six days before Christmas, Darien Harris’ family showed up to court hoping he would be granted bail. They got more than they expected. He will walk out of a Chicago courthouse as a 30-year-old exonerated man after being incarcerated for 12 years.
On Tuesday, prosecutors dropped all charges against Harris in the 2011 shooting of Rondell Moore. Harris’ conviction was largely based on the testimony of a witness who turned out to be legally blind. Earlier this month, a judge overturned his conviction, and Cook County prosecutors said they planned to retry him. But after reviewing the totality of the evidence, they decided against retrying Harris.
Harris’ mother, Nekesha Harris, can finally release the shame and fear she said she’s been carrying for years as she raised her younger children.
“I feel like I am dreaming. I guess when I feel him in my arms, it will be real,” she said outside the courtroom shortly after prosecutors decided not to go forward with a second trial.
This outcome may be an answered prayer, but experts say the Harris case underscores a series of cracks in the criminal justice system. Mistaken eyewitness identification is among the leading contributors in wrongful conviction cases across the country.
Of the more than 3,400 wrongful convictions since 1989, more than 900 — most of them Black — were the result of witnesses mistakenly identifying a person as the culprit, according to the National Registry of Exonerations’ database.
Black men are also overrepresented in the headcount of exonerees every year. Moreover, most exonorees were incarcerated for more than half of their lives. Harris was arrested weeks before his high school graduation in June 2011 and convicted in 2014.
Research and legal experts say that no matter how confident an individual appears, there are several factors that could distort what that person says they saw from what actually happened. The Innocence Project found that more than 60% of exoneration cases it has worked on were convictions based on eyewitness testimony.
That’s why taking the word of one person to solve a crime is not — and should not be — the gold standard to make an arrest or land a conviction, said Bernarda Villalona, a former homicide prosecutor turned defense attorney.
“I don’t think that a prosecution can be based just solely on the eyewitness without corroboration because it’s very difficult for me to say with 100% certainty that I can trust that witness’s identification. You always need more,” Villalona said.
Without credible witnesses and forensic evidence, said Lauren Myerscough-Mueller, one of Harris’ attorneys, it was “baffling” that they were willing to waste taxpayers dollars by not only denying him bail, but also retrying the case.
“From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like if this case came to them [the Cook County State Attorney’s Office] today with the evidence as it is, it doesn’t seem like they would even charge,” Myerscough-Mueller, a staff attorney with the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago, said in an interview with Capital B ahead of Tuesday’s court appearance.
Yet, as Harris’ family celebrates, another family’s sense of closure has been disrupted. For 12 years, Moore’s family and friends believed that the police arrested, and prosecutors convicted the right person.
“That’s the hard part of this kind of work, is that someone did die. A horrible crime happened that never should have happened. The thing that makes it even worse is when the wrong person is convicted or when the police or the state go after the wrong person, that’s not doing right by the victim or by their family,” Myerscough-Mueller said.
Unresolved questions from the start
Harris told the same story to law enforcement officials for years. In 2011, he couldn’t have killed Moore or seriously injured Quincy Woulard at a gas station on the Southside of Chicago because he was at home watching the NBA Finals with his girlfriend.
During the 2014 trial, Aaron Jones, the alleged getaway driver, confessed on the witness stand that he was coerced by police to identify Harris as the person he dropped off at the gas station moments before the shooting, or face life in prison.
His mom left court that day believing that Harris would walk out with her and her white lie to the kids would go away without any harm. (She told his younger siblings that he was away at college.)
But controversial former Cook County Circuit Court Judge Nicholas Ford, who presided over Harris’ trial, came to a different conclusion. He wrote in his decision that he only trusted the testimony of one witness: Dexter Saffold.
As it turned out, Saffold was legally blind.
In fact, the judge also disregarded Saffold’s reluctance to answer questions about his eyesight — Saffold denied being legally blind since 2002.
During Harris’ post-conviction appeal, his appellate lawyers did some digging on the now 62-year-old Saffold. They found that at the time of the shooting, his vision had been impaired due to progression of diabetes. Saffold’s visual impairment was revealed in 13 federal civil rights lawsuits he filed since 2001 against businesses such as Papa John’s Pizza claiming that he was discriminated against because of his vision.
An ophthalmology expert reviewed Saffold’s medical records that were submitted as exhibits in connection to his lawsuits and concluded that his vision was in such poor shape by 2011 that what a normal person would see clearly at 800 feet, he needs to be within 20 feet to see. Harris’ lawyer also learned that Saffold applied for a seeing-eye dog.
“I don’t even know how a prosecutor can ethically move forward and in good faith with somebody who was declared legally blind, especially when you’re dealing with strangers,” said Villalona, the former homicide prosecutor turned defense attorney. “We’re not dealing with a family member, or friend, or person that they’ve known for years, we’re dealing with an absolute stranger … and in a case where identification is key to the prosecution.”
It’s unclear if Saffold told the trial prosecutor about his diagnosis.
In 2019, Harris’ appeal with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office’s recently renamed Conviction Review Unit (CRU) was denied.
But Harris’ attorneys say they weren’t deterred that the prosecutor’s renowned CRU rejected their request in 2021 because they knew that a fair judge would eventually see Harris’ conviction was unjust. They filed a petition with the court in February 2022 to request a new trial. Their post-conviction investigation revealed that the testimony the trial judge says he heavily relied on to convict Harris came from Saffold.
Judge Diana L. Kenworthy decided on Dec. 5 of this year to overturn Harris’ conviction based on the same evidence the CRU reviewed. Harris’ case wasn’t counted as an exoneration that day, since Cook County prosecutors vowed to retry his case.
A family is also sentenced
Today, Nekesha Harris says she cannot believe how much credible evidence was ignored by the police, prosecutors, and judge in her son’s case.
For 12 years, she has had to navigate life on the outside without her oldest child.
“I’ve been through it. I’ve feared for my life,” she said.
She told Capital B in a phone interview that with her oldest son’s release, she plans to “immediately” pack her family up and leave Chicago. “I don’t want to be here. I just want him to have a fresh start. I just feel like a lot of people judged him and had nasty things to say.”
Her own sense of safety also became a huge concern while he was locked up.
She said she received death threats on social media, was scared to go to work every day, and wondered if people who thought Darien did it would retaliate.
She said she also felt shame that Darien was incarcerated. For three years, as Darien prepared for his May 2014 trial, she told his younger siblings that he was enrolled at an HBCU in Alabama located near other relatives and studied the art of music production.
It wasn’t a total fib, since that had always been Darien’s goals after graduation, she said. He also got his GED while incarcerated.
In reality, Darien was forced to grow up behind bars but hadn’t met his younger siblings, and could not attend his grandfather’s funeral. Nekesha says Darien’s mental health has been severely compromised after being placed in solitary confinement for six months straight. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she said.
“He’s also lost so many friends since he’s been in there. And it’s a bittersweet thing for me as a mother because if he wasn’t there …” she paused. “I’m wondering, being in Chicago, what would have happened?”
The prosecutors may have dropped the charges Tuesday morning, but the exit process is long. Between the usual paperwork upon release and figuring out whether Darien will walk out with the same clothes he went in as a teen, it could be hours before his mom will get to finally hold her firstborn.
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