Tim Morrison stamped out corruption and brought humor to a high-stakes, high-stress career

Timothy Morrison, who passed away last week at the age of 73, was for years a guiding hand in the U.S. attorney’s office in Indianapolis.

He wasn't a big name to the public — he led the federal Southern District's prosecution efforts as an interim U.S. attorney, but he was never a presidential appointee.

Yet the prosecutors and judges who knew him are grieving because, to them, he made a splash simply by being an honest public servant.

“Everybody has a Tim Morrison life jacket moment,” Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Doris Pryor told IndyStar. “Where you were sinking, your boat was sinking, and you knew it, right? And you didn’t want to jump off the ship. You could see land.”

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“And right when you thought, 'This whole thing is just going to pot,' here comes Tim Morrison with a life jacket.”

'What do you mean you don't have any guns?'

For her, that life jacket came around 15 years ago. Pryor, who was a federal prosecutor at the time, remembers she was wrapping up a trial against a man accused of illegally possessing more than a dozen long guns.

She was getting ready to step to the front of the court and present her closing argument to the jury. Yet a federal agent couldn't track down the evidence at the heart of the case: the defendant’s illicit arsenal.

Morrison showed up to observe his colleagues in a gesture of support. “I think I'm going to have to request a continuance because I don’t have any guns,” Pryor remembers telling him.

“What do you mean you don’t have any guns?” Morrison said, concerned but calm. ("Oh my god, I'm going to get fired," Pryor thought to herself.)

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She explained the agent couldn’t find the right key to access the safe where the evidence was stashed. So Morrison said he was going to see what he could do, and he left the courtroom.

About 15 minutes later, he came back. He had the defendant's four long-barrel shotguns in his arms. The ATF agent stepped in behind him, pushing a bucket full of other weaponry. Pryor said she's still not sure how they located the evidence that quickly.

Pryor went on to become the first Black judge with roots in the Hoosier state to be confirmed by Congress to the Seventh Circuit. It's a distinction she achieved in December.

“If it wasn’t for Tim Morrison,” she said, “I wouldn’t be sitting in this seat.”

Big cases include Indianapolis police, City-County Council corruption

Morrison's more than two decades as a top prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Indiana spanned from 1988 to 2011. He also led the office as interim U.S. attorney three different times: in 1993, from 2000 to 2001, and from 2007 to 2010.

One of his biggest cases revolved around an east-side Indianapolis resident hailing from Palestine who was convicted for offering to filter CIA agent names to Saddam Hussein's government before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.

John Tinder, a former federal judge in the Southern District who presided over that case, told IndyStar it was "very, very bizarre." But Morrison managed its complexity and ultimately netted a 160-month prison sentence for the defendant.

He was honest, Tinder said. “You never doubted what he would represent to the court.”

And he was fair. "He didn't ask for more than he could give," Tinder said. "If the evidence only supported, you know, two counts, there's no way he would be trying to charge 10 counts.”

While at the helm of the U.S. attorney's office in 2008 he oversaw the prosecution of bad actors in law enforcement during one of the worst Indianapolis police corruption scandals in years. Three Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers were convicted in federal court in 2008 for their role in the theft of marijuana and money from drug dealers.

He also led the office when it successfully convicted a former City-County Council member, Lincoln Plowman, for extortion and bribery. Plowman was indicted in 2010 for offering his influence as a politician to a real estate developer interested in bringing a strip club to downtown Indianapolis.

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He said he'd help out if the developer handed over $6,000. The developer ended up being an undercover FBI agent.

Morrison's death 'stunned' legal community

In a November 2021 interview with the IU Maurer School of Law — his last employer — Morrison was asked how he sustained 23 years at the U.S. attorney's office. He guessed, humbly. "I stayed through a number of administrations," Morrison said, "probably because I'm not complicated and I'm not disloyal."

Pryor said that, in court, he wasn't focused on making others aware of his high status in the Justice Department's local outpost. "He never used that, 'I'm the elephant in the room, boom boom boom, look at me,' but when he needed to press for his people, he did," she said.

Former U.S. attorney Deborah Daniels, who worked with Morrison in the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office and in the Southern District, said the legal community was “stunned” by his passing.

She said he was funny. He brought light to an inherently high-stakes, high-stress career. That came through the few times she visited in the year leading up to his death.

“He maintained that sense of humor right up to the end, and a very optimistic attitude,” Daniels said. “He just said, ‘You know, I've lived a good life. I'm at peace with this. I'm gonna work as hard as I can to continue but I'm — I'm OK. I've been lucky.’”

“That's how Tim was,” she said.

Call IndyStar courts reporter Johnny Magdaleno at 317-273-3188 or email him at jmagdaleno@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @IndyStarJohnny

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Tim Morrison, DOJ prosecutor who fought Indy corruption, dies at 73