Chicago man sues city, police after exoneration for 1989 murder, alleging officers framed him

Lee Harris, who spent more than three decades in prison in the murder of a Gold Coast woman before being exonerated and released earlier this year, filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging Chicago police officers framed him for the murder.

Harris, a former resident of the Cabrini-Green housing projects, was sent to prison in 1992 on a 90-year sentence after being convicted in the 1989 murder of Dana Feitler.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, Harris alleges that Richard Zuley — a former Chicago Police Department detective accused of torturous interrogation tactics — and others at CPD coerced false statements from him and drew up false documents, culminating in a false confession.

Harris was exonerated this year, his conviction vacated in March. The impacts of time wrongfully served, he said, weigh heavily on his daily life.

“Life as I know it has changed,” Harris said at a Thursday news conference. “People who I knew have since disappeared, and it has been increasingly hard for me to do minor things … When you lose trust in people, you look at the world completely differently.”

Feitler, 24, was about to start law school at the University of Chicago when she was found shot in an alley in the Gold Coast neighborhood, after being forced to take out $400 from an ATM. Feitler died in the hospital several weeks later. Her parents ultimately offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, according to 2018 reporting by the Marshall Project.

Harris alleges two police officers stationed at Cabrini-Green promised him a cut of the reward money offered by Feitler’s family if he made false statements to other officers about details in Feitler’s murder.

Harris gave more than 20 statements to Area 6 officers and became reliant on them for food and housing before falsely implicating himself in Feitler’s murder, the suit alleges. Before his arrest, Harris had been active in the Cabrini-Green community, organizing softball games and gang violence prevention initiatives, according to the lawsuit.

“Whenever Mr. Harris made a statement that was illogical or did not fit with the Defendant Officers’ narrative of the crime, they pressed him to make a different statement,” the lawsuit alleges.

Defendant officers “repeatedly told Mr. Harris that he did not need a lawyer and reassured him that he would never be arrested, regardless of what he said,” the suit alleges.

Kristen Cabanban, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department, declined to comment on the suit, saying the city had not yet been served with the complaint.

“The Department of Law will review the lawsuit upon service and does not comment on pending litigation,” Cabanban said.

The suit alleges police withheld evidence pointing to another suspect, including eyewitness testimony. It further alleges that a witness, David Toles, was coached to lie that Harris had confessed the murder to him in jail. Toles has since recanted his statement.

No physical evidence connected Harris to the murder during the trial, the suit alleges.

After his time at the Chicago Police Department, Zuley worked at Guantánamo Bay, where his conduct was part of a 2008 Senate investigation into military torture. At least three other incarcerated people in Illinois have accused him of coercing false confessions through violent and unorthodox interrogation tactics.

Thursday’s lawsuit names seven other instances in which Zuly is accused of using controversial tactics against people other than Harris, including physical restraint, verbal harassment, withholding of medication and threats against family members.

Harris was arrested the day before his son’s seventh birthday. Jermaine Harris, who was 40 when his father was released, said family friends in Cabrini-Green helped raise him.

“He did everything he could to try and maintain a relationship with me,” Jermaine Harris said. “(Cabrini-Green neighbors) picked up some of the slack that my dad couldn’t do … they could never fill the whole void that my dad left.”

Harris said he also hopes the suit helps to raise awareness of his experience and create public accountability for wrongful convictions in Chicago. Harris is currently applying for a certificate of innocence.

“This is the last chapter,” Joe Loevy, a lawyer representing Harris, said at the news conference. “He would like justice for what has been done to him many years ago.”

Harris said he did not qualify for social services commonly offered to ex-convicts, since he was exonerated before parole or probation became possible.

Harris was also denied Social Security benefits, he said, as he could not contribute money to the program while incarcerated.

“They say, ‘Well, you could have given us a dollar,’” Harris said. “Well, I only made a dollar a day.”

Harris is not seeking a specific amount of money and has not been in contact with the city since leaving prison. Willie J.R. Fleming, a community activist with the Anti-Eviction campaign, called for an expedited hearing.

“I would like for the city to stop retraumatizing folks who … spent all of these years in jail,” Fleming said at the news conference. “Justice should be as swift for the guilty as it is for the innocent who were wrongfully convicted.”