After 23 years in prison for rape/murder, wrongfully convicted man gets his job back
as a groundskeeper with the White Sox.
And he's not filled with rage. (Listen to him in the CNN clip.) What a sweet man.
ON UPDATE: Coleman and one of his co-defendants had been coerced into signing false statements, and the prosecutor had asked for the death penalty. More details from The Innocence Project, below.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/judge-grants-nevest-coleman-certificate-of-innocence/
Nevest Coleman’s eyes were rimmed with tears as he held a two-page court order handed to him by his lawyer on Friday.
The papers, just signed by Chief Cook County Criminal Courts Judge LeRoy K. Martin, were a “certificate of innocence,” formally exonerating Coleman in a 1994 rape and murder conviction that had sent him to prison for 23 years, before DNA evidence last year cleared him of guilt in the crime.
SNIP
The two men have filed federal civil rights lawsuits, seeking compensation from the city and county, based on their claims that detectives routinely coerced confessions from suspects.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/us/white-sox-hire-wrongly-convicted-groundskeeper-trnd/index.html
(CNN)After spending 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Nevest Coleman is back at work with the Chicago White Sox.
Coleman, then a 25-year-old groundskeeper with the White Sox, was convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of a Chicago woman and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
He was freed last year after DNA found on the victim was linked to a serial rapist.
Friends and family contacted the White Sox after his release to help him get his old job back, CNN affiliate WGN reported.
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https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/nevest-coleman/
In the early morning hours of April 29, 1994, Coleman was arrested and interrogated by Foley and several other detectives, including Kenneth Boudreau, William Halloran, and James O’Brien. At the time, Coleman was a well-respected member of the grounds crew at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox baseball team. He had never been arrested.
Coleman later said that after sitting in an interrogation room for 30 minutes and denying any involvement in the crime, a detective came in and called him a “lying assed nigger.” When Coleman insisted he knew nothing, the detective punched him in the side of the head twice with a closed fist.
Detectives then told him that if he just answered their questions—if he went along with their version of what happened—he would be allowed to go home. The detectives rehearsed what they wanted Coleman to say, and ultimately, Coleman gave a court-reported statement that implicated Taylor and 26-year-old Darryl Fulton as being involved in the abduction, rape, and murder of Bridgeman.
Detectives then arrested Fulton and brought him to the station for questioning. After Fulton denied any involvement in the crime, a detective came into the interrogation room and hit him in the face. The detective then threatened to take Fulton out of the station and “put a bullet in his brain,” Fulton later said.
Fulton was shown a copy of Coleman’s court-reported statement, but he still insisted he was not involved in the crime. Eventually, however, after being told that he would be released if he signed a statement, a detective gave him a hand-written confession and Fulton signed it.
Taylor refused to confess.
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In August 2017, Russell Ainsworth, an attorney with the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, filed a post-conviction petition on behalf of Coleman, and attorney Kathleen Zellner filed a similar petition on behalf of Fulton. The petitions cited the results of the DNA testing and the link to the serial rapist as grounds to vacate the convictions and grant both men a new trial.
Coleman’s petition also cited evidence that some of the detectives involved in his case, including Foley, Halloran, O’Brien, and Boudreau, had been involved in several other wrongful convictions involving false confessions.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
