Brothers seek certificates of innocence after being exonerated in 1994 murder
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Two brothers will learn on Monday if they will be given a certificate of innocence, after being exonerated for a murder they did not commit.
A hearing will get underway at 9:30 a.m. at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse for Sean Tyler and Reginald Henderson, who have said they were tortured into confessing by Chicago police officers overseen by disgraced former Commander Jon Burge.
In 2010, Burge was convicted of lying about the torture of suspects. He served more than 3 years in prison, and later died in 2018.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, Tyler and Henderson were arrested as teenagers in 1994, and tortured into false confessions for the murder of Rodney Collins.
The brothers said they were targeted because Tyler had exposed similar police misconduct in the 1991 murder of Alfredo Hernandez, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Tyler had witnessed that murder, and after 13-year-old Marcus Wiggins was arrested for the murder, Wiggins claimed detectives working under Burge tortured him into a false confession. After Tyler testified during a motion to suppress Wiggins' confession, he and his co-defendants were either acquitted, or their cases were dismissed.
When Collins was shot and killed in 1994, the same detectives from the Hernandez case arrested Henderson and Tyler, based on false witness statements, and beat them into false confessions, leading to their convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
They were exonerated in 2021, when their convictions were dismissed after both had already served more than 20 years in prison, after an appeals court allowed for hearings on whether detectives conspired to fabricate evidence, and the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission found that the medical evidence and detectives' troubled history gave merit to their claims.
Before a formal court hearing on their torture claims, prosecutors dropped the case, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Tyler and Henderson want a certificate of innocence to be granted to remove the conviction from their record. That would also allow them to bring a claim of damage against the state of Illinois.