WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
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Page Not FoundWE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
You cannot have a viable political movement if it doesn't have its own press.
Twenty-five Years of In These Times
1976-2001: From Jimmy Carter to Osama Bin Laden, highlights from the most important stories and most intriguing voices to have appeared in our pages.
Anniversary Greetings
Thanks to our friends and supporters.
Appealing to Reason
Back Talk
The real toy story.
Back on the air at Pacifica.
India and Pakistan inch closer to war over Kashmir.
No Relief
Behind Argentina's economic meltdown.
The World Economic Forum is coming to New York.
Under the Radar
Bush quietly thwarts environmental regulations.
Private Schooling
Edison Inc. bids to take over Philadelphia education.
Kathleen Zellner: Freedom Fighter.
Follow the Money
BOOKS: It makes the world go 'round.
Not So Innocent
BOOKS: Arthur Schnitzler, sexual neurosis and the bourgoisie.
FILM: Ali and Black Hawk Down
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January 18, 2002
In Person
Freedom Fighter.
Thankfully, Zellner also has a penchant for picking fights on behalf of the
wrongfully convicted. Using the same formidable research techniques that have
proven so successful in the civil suits, Zellner has won the freedom of seven
wrongfully convicted men in the past seven years. Take Omar Saunders and cousins Larry and Calvin Ollins, who took their first
free breaths as adults on December 5. Wrongfully convicted as teen-agers along
with another man, Marcellius Bradford, for the rape and murder of Rush University
Medical School student Lori Roscetti, the three men had served 15 years in prison
for a crime they did not commit. In 1987, Saunders, the Ollins cousins and Bradford were arrested and accused
of Roscetti’s murder. At the trial, the four men were convicted based on
the confessions of Bradford and Calvin Ollins. Zellner says those confessions were beaten out of Bradford and coaxed out of
14-year-old Calvin Ollins under the pretense that he’d be allowed to go
home. Even more insidious, Zellner says, their statements were actually handwritten
by police on yellow legal pads, who devised the hypotheses after talking to
an FBI profiler. “He’s stripped and hooked to the wall,” as Zellner
describes Bradford’s interrogation. “Then both cops come in. One of
them puts on gloves and they just start beating. … Then they take him,
they polygraph him and tell him he flunked. They bring him back, they dump a
bucket of mop water over him, dirty mop water, and they’re telling him
they’re going to kill him.” The three men were just teens when a Cook County judge handed each of them
life sentences. Bradford, who pled guilty, served six years of a 12-year sentence. In 2000, Zellner took on the case, and within a year, the prosecution’s
case against the men had fallen apart. In a report commissioned by Zellner,
noted forensic scientist Edward Blake said research by the Illinois State Police
crime lab, used as evidence in the 1988 trial as well as eight other cases,
amounted to “scientific fraud.” Bradford admitted he lied at the trial,
and additional witnesses came forward to say they, too, had implicated the four
men during the trial to protect themselves. Finally, a series of DNA tests on
hair and semen exonerated the victims. But even as the case began to crumble, Chicago police officials still clung
to their account of what happened. They said it was a “smash and grab,”
though she didn’t seem to be missing any money. They said Roscetti was
hijacked and attacked in her car, though her injuries indicated she was probably
just transported in the vehicle. “No police officer would have made up
the story of what they did to her prior to her death and after her head was
crushed,” Chicago Police Deputy Chief James Maurer told the Chicago Sun-Times
in June. “Stephen King does not even write that stuff.” But the question of who does lingers, because by the time Cook County State’s
Attorney Richard Devine announced he was seeking a dismissal of the case, no
evidence against the men remained. On December 4, a judge voided their convictions.
Zellner plans to file a lawsuit over the city and county’s handling of
the case. This time, she says, “I would say [the settlement] could go anywhere
from $1 million to $5 or $6 million.” Though she’s reaped the kind of criminal defense success it would take
most a lifetime to achieve, Zellner’s career runs the gamut. Before starting
her own practice in 1990, she worked as a medical malpractice defense attorney
for hospitals and insurance companies. In 1999, she began concentrating on civil
cases, developing a specialty in sexual assault and women’s health suits
alongside the malpractice suits that make up the larger part of her practice.
All the while, she has continued her hobby of getting innocent men out of jail.
The string of victories began in 1994 with Death Row inmate Joseph Burrows:
Zellner persuaded the real killer to confess, and Burrows was released. In 1997,
Billy Wardell and Donald Reynolds were cleared of wrongdoing after DNA testing
revealed they were innocent of the rape and robbery of two University of Chicago
students; they had served nine years of their 55-year sentences. Now, in the
wake of the highly publicized Roscetti decision, Zellner is at work on two more
cases she believes are the result of false confessions. Zellner’s only regret is that she can take on only a few of the criminal
and civil cases she is contacted about. An encyclopedia-high stack of letters,
some of them handwritten and bearing the sterile return stamp of state penitentiaries,
rests atop a stately wooden desk in the rear of her office. “There are
other innocent people in there that have approached me, we’ve examined
their cases, and there isn’t anything we can do,” she concedes. Unfortunate
factors, like irreversible attorney errors, can compound inmates’ dilemmas.
“There are about five of them that we feel from our re-investigation are
innocent, and we can’t help them.” Zellner sees herself as part of a new breed of legal reformers, not unlike
the attorneys who won big with product liability cases in the late ’70s
and early ’80s. “That’s how I feel, like the Ralph Nader of the
criminal world,” she says. “When you get very large verdicts, then
products no longer malfunction, cars don’t blow up and … eventually,
I think, if there are large verdicts, they will start cracking down on the police.”
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WE NEED TO BE UNITED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM AND REPRESSION
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
