A deadly arson in 1988 sets 2 men on divergent paths through the tangled Cook County justice system
It was after dark by the time Arthur Brown, skinny and shellshocked, walked out of Cook County Jail.
A crowd of supporters was waiting. “That’s him! That’s him!” they screamed. “He’s free!”
It was November 2017. Prosecutors had thrown out his case. For the 29 years leading to that exact moment, Brown had been locked up for a fatal fire he insisted he did not set.
He walked out to a scrum of news cameras. He pumped his fist and embraced his niece. He wanted to be around his family, he told reporters. He wanted to sleep in a real bed, eat a real meal. He would be home in time for Thanksgiving.
“It’s so much emotion,” he told reporters. “Feels like a burden has gone, to be free.”
A few days later, a newspaper was floating through Pontiac prison, passed from cell to cell between the metal bars.
It made its way to Michael Harper, who instantly recognized the man on the front page: Arthur Brown, his co-defendant, walking free.
“I was overwhelmed with joy, to see him get out. And it brought tears to my eyes,” Harper recalled.
“I thought my freedom would be near,” he said during an interview in a downstate prison. “It didn’t happen.”
A deadly blaze
This much is agreed upon:
Before dawn on a Saturday in May 1988, someone set fire to the Magic Video store in Woodlawn. The flames ripped down 63rd Street, through the barbershop and the sandwich spot and the King Chef restaurant, where two people had bunked for the night.
They were found dead, collapsed near a doorway with soot smeared around their faces.
Harper, the video store’s co-owner, and Brown, a local handyman, were both charged with murder soon afterward.
It was arson, and it was fatal.
The rest — who set the fire, and under what circumstances — was the subject of six trials, multiple appeals, countless post-conviction petitions, a thorny civil lawsuit and a lengthy but so far unsuccessful clemency process.
Thirty-five years after Magic Video burned, Brown is a free citizen. This summer he won multimillion-dollar wrongful-conviction settlements from the city of Chicago and Cook County.
Harper has exhausted all his avenues for release. He is in a downstate prison, waiting to see if the governor will grant him the clemency he requested more than two years ago.
Their journeys began in the same place. They ended on different planets.
Harper and his lawyers argue he is an innocent man repeatedly victimized by a fickle justice system. Others, including Brown’s attorney and the prosecutor who reexamined the case, have said the evidence against the two men was fundamentally different — different enough that they couldn’t say with confidence that Harper should be exonerated.
Whichever is correct, their stories illustrate a truth about the system that is rarely acknowledged: Justice is not a science. It is not a monolith. Guilty or innocent, your fate can hinge on human interpretation, timing and simple chance.
GAS 403
The 400 block of East 63rd Street — between King Drive and Vernon Avenue, under the rumbling L tracks — was once home to a busy strip of storefronts.
Among them was Magic Video, co-owned by Harper and his mother. It did steady business renting and selling VHS tapes.
Next door was the King Chef restaurant, opened by Kiert Phophairat, an immigrant who viewed the shop as his chance to prove himself as an American businessman. Sometimes he would sleep there.
Down the block was a storefront that had, for a brief while, been Arthur Brown’s spot: He rented it out, renovated it and turned it into a restaurant for his mother. It was only open for a month. After it closed, Brown continued in his regular business as a contractor, mending roofs and doing jobs around the neighborhood.
Brown was at Magic Video, at Harper’s request, not long before it burned, in the early morning hours of May 28, 1988.
Brown and Harper have repeatedly differed in their accounting of why Brown was called there. Brown says Harper called him to come fix the door after a break-in; he secured it with a two-by-four and then left Harper and two other men in the store. Harper denies that; instead, he says he asked Brown to come over and put up shelves, and then he left Brown alone inside.
Around 5 a.m., the store was ablaze. A firefighter later testified he saw the windows had “blackened over,” and grayish-brown smoke “seemed to be pulsating from the mortar from the building itself ... in this situation the building sort of looks like it’s alive.”
Their attempts to get inside the locked store triggered a backdraft and an explosion so powerful it knocked him over, he testified.
Once the fire was out, he walked through the destroyed remains, which stank of gasoline. Next door, adjacent to the King Chef restaurant, he found the bodies of the restaurant owner and an acquaintance, who had apparently been sleeping there.
Later on, someone picking through the trash behind the video store found a 2-gallon gasoline can underneath a pile of clothes.
Thirty-five years later, much of the other evidence gathered those first few days has been disputed.
A Citgo employee, according to police, said earlier that morning he had seen two men in a Ford Bronco sloppily fill up a can of gas, and later identified them as Harper’s uncle and cousin. Years later, he would completely recant, saying police leaned on him to lie about what he saw.
A bystander told police that right before the fire he saw a vehicle with the license plate GAS 403 drive up near the store, and two men — one carrying a gas can — jumped out and went into the video store. Harper’s lawyers say that man was illiterate and could not have read the license plate, but those claims were never fully tested in court, and the man has since died.
Harper was at the scene, too. He identified himself as the owner of Magic Video, and agreed to come to the station to help the investigation.
At least two nearby witnesses said Harper was involved in drug dealing in the hours before the fire, though police don’t appear to have followed up on whether that was true, or if it had anything to do with the arson.
After a short time at the police station, Harper gave police a confession.
The interrogations
The police version of events goes like this: Harper told them he drove a Ford Bronco with the license plate GAS 403, and that he had the only keys to the Magic Video store.
When detectives told him the store had been locked up, and that the Bronco had been spotted at the store right before someone noticed the flames, Harper decided to talk.
In the court-reported statement, Harper said he talked to Brown about setting fire to the video store so he could collect on insurance money, and Brown agreed to do so in exchange for some X-rated videotapes. Harper claimed he left the building before the fire was set. The statement also implicated two of Harper’s relatives, Geronia Ford and Albert Harper.
No evidence ever emerged that there was any insurance policy on the tapes or the building itself. In fact, the landlord later stated that he did not have fire insurance on the storefront.
Harper, for his part, says police coerced him into confessing — in part by threatening to arrest his mother if he didn’t play along.
Police now had Arthur Brown’s name and Harper’s statement fingering him as the person who actually set the fire.
Police said he gave a statement voluntarily. Brown alleged something far darker — testifying later that a detective choked him and slammed him against the wall to get him to talk. “It hit hard enough to shake my brains,” he said.
That statement, written in longhand by a prosecutor, was taken down about four hours after Harper’s. It told the story this way: Brown got a call from Harper early that morning, asking him to meet at the video store. When he got there, Harper said he was going to burn the store down and asked Brown to help him make it look like the place had been burglarized.
Police apparently did little to independently corroborate the confessions — an original sin that led to decades of confusion, attorneys for the men have said..
A retired Washington, D.C., detective later hired by Harper’s attorneys wrote in a report that police could have requested audits of the receipts and gas pump information from the Citgo where the gas can was allegedly filled; and they could have compared the gas in the recovered gas can with the gas in the pumps.
The men’s clothes and shoes were apparently not examined for evidence of contact with gasoline. “You ever pump gas and pour a little on any of your clothes?” Brown’s attorney Ron Safer said in an interview this year.
Prison life
Western Illinois Correctional Center is a compact facility, a brown dot in the sprawling farmland between Springfield and Quincy. Somewhere nearby there is a shooting range; walking through the prison campus, you can hear echoes of gunfire.
This is where Michael Harper lives. He wakes up in his cell long before dawn, a habit he picked up in his time at the notorious Tamms supermax, where he and his fellow inmates were kept in extraordinary isolation and sensory deprivation.
So he gets up in the middle of the night and reads in low light so as not to wake his cellmate. Mostly the Bible and the Quran. He plays basketball, he goes to the gym, and he sends emails in all-caps: “I AM THANKFUL, GRATEFUL & BLESSED!”
He is innocent, he insists. He has even more evidence of his innocence than Arthur Brown ever did, he repeats, and yet here he still is. In the time he has been locked up, his mother and grandmother both died. When he mentions them he freezes midsentence and begins to weep, as though he has been physically struck. His daughter was just a toddler when he went in, and now she is in her late 30s.
“I’m at peace with myself,” he told the Tribune. “That’s one thing they can’t take from me. They can take a lot of things but they can’t take my peace, my mind.”
The charges
Illinois law allows prosecutors to bring charges under a “felony murder” rule. If a defendant commits one of a certain category of felonies, and it results in someone’s death — even if the defendant did not intend or foresee the death — they can be charged with murder.
Brown, Michael Harper, Ford and Albert Harper all were implicated in setting the fatal fire, so prosecutors under then-State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley brought charges of arson and first-degree murder against all four.
And they wanted the death penalty for Michael Harper and Brown. When Brown heard he was being held without bail, he collapsed to the courtroom floor.
“I’m just emotional,” Brown said after someone helped him into a chair.
The case was assigned to Judge Fred Suria, known widely as “Fair Fred.”
Ford was later convicted of arson, but not murder, and Albert Harper was acquitted entirely.
Separately, Michael Harper and Brown both asked Judge Suria to throw out their confessions, but Suria turned them down. In the spring of 1990, Suria presided over a joint trial, at which separate juries found Brown and Harper guilty of first-degree murder and arson. Suria sentenced them both to natural life.
From there, the cases split, each into its own separate thicket of appeals and petitions and legal maneuvering. They would leapfrog each other for decades to come, one surging forward while the other one stalled, then vice versa.
Separate tracks
Harper and Brown’s cases had their first major division at the appellate court: Harper’s appeal was granted, and Brown’s was denied.
Harper’s claims were extensive and minutely detailed, alleging a mountain of errors that, the appeals court said, would have been minor in isolation. But so many of them together was a miscarriage of justice, the court said in granting Harper a new trial.
Brown’s conviction, though, would stand. He was tried at the same time as Harper by the same prosecutors, so many of the same problems very likely occurred. But Brown’s anemic appeal didn’t raise any of those claims, and an appellate court will only answer the questions it’s asked. Brown accused the judge of just two errors, both of which the appeals court swiftly rejected.
Brown stayed in state prison. Harper went back to county jail, waiting for his second trial before Suria.
In April 1994, the day Harper’s second trial was set to begin, Judge Suria took the bench and announced a “misunderstanding” that would reverberate through Harper’s case for decades to come.
“The court is, in fact, engaged in another jury trial at this moment. So I cannot go forward,” he said. It was nothing more than a scheduling mix-up.
The attorneys could delay the trial another two months, or transfer the case to another judge. They chose to transfer.
So Harper’s case went to Judge Daniel Locallo, who was at that point a “floating” judge who substituted for unavailable colleagues.
“I suppose it’s inevitable, especially in as large and as full a justice system as ours here in Chicago,” said Kieran Wiberg, an attorney with the Office of the State Appellate Defender who handled one of Harper’s many appeals. “Just random little things occur that just send you off on different trajectories. And you can’t help but look back and go, wow, if somebody (else) had been available this day, how much different would the rest of this case have looked?”
It was Locallo who again sentenced Harper to life in prison.
In the ensuing years, higher courts denied Harper’s appeals, Locallo rejected his post-conviction claims, and appellate courts denied Harper’s appeals of Locallo’s denials.
One such claim included a momentous revelation tucked in at the very end: Someone else had confessed to setting the fire.
Different offender?
James Othello Bell has been in prison since 1992. Before that, to hear him tell it, he was a daredevil drug trafficker, roaming the city with cash and cocaine.
He did time for armed robbery in the 1980s, but by the time he got out, stickups were out of style. “Caveman” stuff, Bell said in a 2020 deposition. The real money was in drugs, so he started dealing.
“I got the car, I got guns, I got scales, I got bulletproof vests, I got everything,” he said. And it’s here where his testimony tips into bravado. He sold all over the city to all types of people, he said; he made $20,000 a day; he spent it on gambling and Champagne and women.
It fell apart, he said, when he got sloppy with the money and found himself in debt: “I had to go back to what I was good at, which was the armed robbery.”
He might have been good, but he still got caught. In 1989 he was charged with a slew of armed robberies, and sentenced to life upon conviction.
And nearly 10 years after the fire on 63rd Street, Bell made his first appearance in the case of Harper and Brown.
It was 1997. Harper had been convicted a second time. His appeal had failed. The next step was the post-conviction process, by which petitioners like Harper argue for new trials on the grounds that their rights were violated.
The filing tucked this in at the very end: “Michael Harper seeks post-conviction relief that another individual, James Dell, has confessed to the crime at issue.”
Locallo shot it down. There were no affidavits or any other evidence attached to the petition that could show someone else — Bell, Dell, anyone — confessed.
Harper appealed. The higher court shot that down too.
But the word was out. And 11 years to the day after the fatal fire, Brown, acting as his own lawyer, docketed a post-conviction petition of his own. It reads, in ragged ’90s typeface: “The ‘Confession’ of the individual ‘James Dell’ submitted in co-defendant Michael Harper’s ‘Post-Conviction’ Petition must be investigated and brought before this Honorable Court.”
It was Brown’s attorneys who, two years later, would send investigators to visit Bell in Stateville and get his sworn affidavit:
“I got angry and burnt the store down using a gas can,” it reads. “I was a drug addict at the time and did not care about anything. I am now a changed man.”
A drug debt comes due?
Starting in 2001, Bell has repeatedly told the story along these lines: In his time as a freewheeling drug dealer, one of his regular clients was Arthur Brown.
Bell thought Brown owned the video store. He was a businessman, not some street hustler, Bell figured, so when Brown got behind on payments for the drugs, Bell was patient at first.
By the end of May 1988, Brown’s drug debt had grown, and in the early morning hours of May 28, Bell went looking for him.
He couldn’t find him. So instead, he said he sneaked into the video store, poured out a can of gasoline, and set the room on fire.
He didn’t tell anyone for years, and then he said he found God. During a Bible study group, some other inmates were talking about their past cases, and Bell told them about the fire.
It is, even after all this time, not quite clear how Bell’s confession came to light beyond that. Taking Bell at his word, it’s possible that someone in the Bible study group alerted authorities to the confession.
Some, including attorneys hired by the city to defend against Brown’s civil rights claims, take a harsher view: Bell’s confession is bogus.
Bell was, in fact, recorded on a prison phone in 2018 saying that Harper and Brown were actually guilty. But when questioned about it in a deposition, he said that wasn’t true.
Attorneys for both men each deny their clients ever collaborated with Bell on a fake confession. Brown also denies key elements of Bell’s story, saying he never bought drugs from Bell or owed him money.
Differing decisions
Whatever its provenance, Bell’s confession was a bombshell. And since Brown and Harper’s cases had long since split between different courtrooms, two different judges would have to decide whether it was enough to throw out a conviction. Brown’s judge said yes. Harper’s judge, many years later, said no.
Harper’s various attempts before Judge Locallo went nowhere, as did his many appeals and a request to get a federal judge to throw out his conviction. His efforts outlasted Locallo’s time at the criminal courthouse — Locallo was transferred to a different division in the late ’90s..
After that, Harper’s case went before Judge Kenneth Wadas, who, even more than most 26th Street judges, has a harsh law-and-order reputation.
In 2003, Harper came to court with something new: Not only did he have the Bell confession, but he also had an affidavit from the Citgo employee, Cecil Hingston — who had recanted his story entirely, saying police leaned on him to lie about selling gas to Harper’s relatives.
Wadas agreed to put the petition on his docket, apparently with some reluctance. Harper, he said, “will get his day in court, even though he has been through the appellate court two to three times, the supreme court two to three times, and the federal district court a couple (of) times.”
Brown’s case, meanwhile, was still in front of Suria — who in August 2003 decided that Bell’s claims should be heard by a jury. Brown had won his new trial.
While Harper waited for an answer, and Brown waited for his second trial, two major changes occurred: Judge “Fair Fred” Suria retired, and Cecil Hingston died.
So Brown’s second trial was in front of Judge Joseph Claps. And Hingston was not there to testify about whether or not police pressured him into a false story about Harper’s relatives filling up a gasoline can.
Brown’s attorneys — one of whom, Erica Reddick, is now the highest-ranking judge in the Cook County Criminal Division — didn’t try to show jurors Hingston’s recantation, believing it would be inadmissible hearsay. Instead, they focused tightly on James Bell, who took the stand once again to say he set the fire.
Meanwhile, the same detectives who testified at the first trial took the stand again. But this time, the testimony was different in a crucial way.
The first time around, they’d explicitly said the gasoline can had been recovered before Brown gave his statement — a sequence of events that is backed up by police records. At the second trial, their timeline was more ambiguous.
Prosecutors seized on it, saying in their closing arguments that the gas can “was out there and they found it after they talked to this guy.”
But that wasn’t true. And if Brown’s defense attorneys noticed the discrepancy, they didn’t object.
Jurors, either convinced by the false gas-can timeline or finding Bell less than credible or both, convicted Brown of arson and murder once again.
‘Zero credibility’
While Brown was granted a new trial, retried and re-convicted, Harper waited for closure.
Wadas at first denied Harper’s request for a full hearing into whether Harper should get a new trial. The appellate court reversed him, saying it was clear that Bell’s and Hingston’s affidavits counted as new evidence.
And the appellate justices sent the case back to Wadas with a stern warning: Don’t let this drag out so long, lest other crucial witnesses die in the interim.
But Wadas’ cases move extraordinarily slowly, even by Cook County standards. It took another two years, until 2015, for Harper’s evidentiary hearing to begin.
One key question was largely the same as it was for Brown in front of Judge Suria: Was Bell’s testimony so significant that it could change the result at retrial?
But in the end, Wadas fired off a blistering rebuke of all Harper’s claims. Bell was “totally unbelievable” with “zero credibility,” Wadas said. Hingston’s recantation, so many years after the fact, was “inherently unreliable.” And Harper’s claims of police coercion were not believable, he said.
“(His) denial of his participation in this act, actually he probably believes it in his own mind at this point in time,” Wadas said.
Harper’s attorneys promptly appealed, sending his case to the higher court yet again. This time they were unsuccessful.
It was Wadas’ responsibility alone to determine whether Bell and Hingston’s stories were credible, they said. It was Wadas, not the appeals court, who watched Bell testify. Wadas’ decision would stand, and so would Harper’s conviction.
A fateful plea for help
As Harper was waiting for resolution, attorney Ron Safer got a letter.
A request along the lines of: I am stuck here in prison even though I am innocent, please take up my case.
After a review of the record, Safer was convinced Brown’s story could be the real deal. Safer visited him in prison, and came away a believer.
Brown’s affect, Safer remembers, was gentle and deliberate. He made near-constant eye contact. He didn’t strike Safer as the type to be able to come up with on-the-spot lies in response to the attorneys’ questions.
Safer and his team filed a lengthy post-conviction petition before Judge Claps, arguing there were several errors at his second trial.
But Brown had reached his mid-60s, and his health was faltering, Safer said. He had lost weight off his already skinny frame. Safer emerged from one jail visit unsure if Brown would survive to see the hearing.
So when a prosecutor said the office might consider letting Brown plead to time served, Safer urged Brown to take what he could.
“Absolutely not,” Brown said, according to Safer’s recollection. “I will not plead guilty to something I did not do. Period.”
Brown not only lived to see the hearing, he lived to win a new trial.
In October 2017, Judge Claps threw out murder conviction. It was the gas can, in the end, that convinced him. In closing arguments, prosecutors clearly said that police found the gas can after speaking to Brown, which was blatantly false.
But Brown would stay in custody; prosecutors filed notice that they would be asking an appeals court to reverse Claps’ decision, and they objected to Brown’s release on bond in the meantime.
It made Safer furious, and he began raising the issue with officials from Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office.
The matter ended up on the desk of Foxx’s then-second-in-command, Eric Sussman. Reading Brown’s confession gave Sussman pause, he said in a 2020 deposition. It didn’t pass the smell test, he said; Brown was much older than Harper, they weren’t related, they weren’t close friends.
But Sussman was not tasked with determining whether Brown was actually innocent. His job, the way he saw it, was to decide whether they could win an appeal of Claps’ order, and whether they should put Brown on trial again.
Evidence weakens over time, and it had been nearly three decades. There were at least two dead witnesses, he said in his deposition, and presumably the investigating officers had long since retired.
Sussman also considered “whether it made sense that resources ... should be used to retry someone who was 67 years old and had spent 30 years in jail.”
“The concern was that there might have been an innocent man that was convicted for that crime,” Sussman said in his deposition. “And to the extent that he was not an innocent man, he would have spent over — or close to 30 years in jail.”
Prosecutors went before Claps not long afterward to formally drop the charges. The hearing was over in moments.
“That is discharged,” Claps said from the bench. “OK, bye-bye.”
Later that evening, Brown stepped out of Cook County Jail into the cold night air.
In the months afterward, he would successfully petition for a certificate of innocence, which prosecutors chose not to oppose.
A new review
Brown’s new trial had been won via the post-conviction process, which is intended to process claims that constitutional rights have been violated.
Harper had gone through that process and lost. So after Brown’s release, Harper’s attorneys took a different route: urging the prosecutors’ Conviction Integrity Unit, which considers claims of innocence, to consider his case.
They sent Mark Rotert, then the head of the CIU, a packet of materials and urged him to take a close look. His response was scrupulously restrained.
“You write that it seems terribly unjust that one person has been released on a finding of actual innocence, while a codefendant in the same case for the same crime remains in prison,” he sent in an email in 2018. “I recognize that on its face this might seem to present an unfairness.”
But, he urged them to keep in mind, the prosecutors who released Brown were never actually tasked with figuring out if he was innocent.
“I’m not asserting (Brown) was guilty, I’m only saying that we were never obliged to call out a decision on the issue, and so we didn’t,” he wrote.
With that, Rotert dug in. The review of the case took the better part of a year. And around Christmas 2018, he broke the news to Harper’s attorneys: He wasn’t 100% convinced that Harper was, in fact, innocent.
There was one serious sticking point, Rotert told the Tribune this year: The eyewitness who said that right before the fire he saw two men with a gas can hop out of Harper’s vehicle.
“I thought Michael made a great presentation and was a very likable person,” said Rotert, who is now retired from the state’s attorney’s office. “As far as I can recall, I didn’t have problems with anything else he was telling me but for that pivotal point.”
And unlike the prosecutors who reviewed the Brown case, the purpose of the Conviction Integrity Unit was to advocate for those whom prosecutors determined were probably innocent. In Rotert’s own words: “I couldn’t get there.”
“Devastating, is what I would call it,” Dan Campbell, one of Harper’s current attorneys, told the Tribune this year.
A civil lawsuit
Arthur Brown, meanwhile, filed an expansive federal lawsuit against the city, the detectives who interrogated him, and the prosecutor who took his statement.
With the lawsuit came a chance to relitigate, in excruciating detail, whether Brown was guilty or innocent.
Lawyers for the city, the detectives’ estates and the prosecutor fought hard, picking at every possible weakness in Brown’s story.
His alibi witness only surfaced at the eleventh hour, they said, the James Bell story is phony, and despite the certificate of innocence no prosecutors ever actually said he was innocent.
The case dragged on and got so complicated that, at a hearing in March, Chief Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer warned attorneys that if they didn’t settle soon, they could be tied up in appeals for years and years.
They took Pallmeyer’s advice. Brown would get $14.5 million altogether; half from the county and half from the city. The settlements sailed through the approval process.
Brown plans to buy his daughter some property, Safer said, fix up a building for her, something that could generate income.
The money is significant, Safer said, but he often feels an “emptiness.” A win at trial would have meant not only money but vindication, a public acknowledgment that Brown was wronged.
“I did not get him the affirmation that the justice system could give him,” he said. “Thirty years in jail for a crime you didn’t commit at the hands of the criminal justice system. The justice system should say, ‘I’m sorry. I see you. I hear you.’”
A final chance
Meanwhile, down at Western, Michael Harper waits.
Every avenue for his release has been exhausted except one: a clemency petition his attorneys filed before Gov. J.B. Pritzker. His hearing was two years ago, and he hasn’t heard anything about whether the governor will grant his release.
His attorneys were optimistic after the clemency hearing, back in October 2021. It even ended with one of the review board members expressing “heavy skepticism” about Wadas, according to Campbell.
Harper’s attorneys, current and former, have remained unusually engaged in his cause, given that his case is no longer live in any courtroom.
To them, it is simple — by mere chance, Harper got slotted in front of a judge who didn’t give his claims a fair shot, and it hobbled his chances at a remedy from other sources.
“I really do think that big difference is, are (prosecutors) put to the choice, either we try to convict this person again, or we let it go,” the appeal attorney Wiberg said. “For Arthur, they got put to that choice. And for Michael, they didn’t.”
Even if that argument wasn’t convincing, Campbell said, you could argue it is fundamentally unfair to keep Harper in prison for so long on a “felony murder” theory — after all, nobody ever argued that he deliberately killed anyone.
James Bell may well have set the fire, Safer said, but his frequent “off-the-wall” statements and demeanor would make it difficult for him to look reliable in front of a jury. Sid Malone may well have been illiterate, but he is dead, and there’s no way to prove whether he was coerced into telling police what they wanted to hear.
“There’s objective truth, and then there’s trial truth — there’s what you can argue to a jury with credibility,” Safer told the Tribune. “And sometimes the two are quite different.”
Clemency is handled outside a courtroom, and a whole universe beyond “trial truth” — objective claims, subjective arguments, gray areas — can be put before the governor. Harper is still surprised that his case got to that point at all.
“(The case) shouldn’t have had to go to (Pritzker), to the executive branch. It should have been in a circuit court,” Harper said. “I’d like to say it is mind-boggling I’m still sitting here. But I know how the system is.”
