Entries associated with the tag "John Conroy":

On Sunday night 60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon talked to Alton Logan, who's been in prison since he was convicted of murdering a McDonald's security guard in 1982, and to lawyers Jamie Kunz and Dale Coventry, who have known the whole time that he was innocent but kept it to themselves. Simon respected the dilemma Kunz and Coventry found themselves in -- the actual killer was their client and had admitted to them that he did it, but their code of ethics forbade them to do anything that would increase his legal jeopardy. But Logan couldn't understand why that code of ethics mattered more to Coventry and Kunz than ending the injustice that had sent him to prison for life, and Simon seemed content to leave his audience unable to understand it either.

Probably 13 minutes wasn't long enough to tell a story this complicated. Here's what Simon boiled down and left out: There weren't two lawyers who knew Logan was innocent and signed an affidavit saying so -- there were four. One of them had no ethical obligation to Wilson -- he represented Wilson's accomplice in the murder. Furthermore, the police and prosecutorial work that convicted Logan was disgraceful. Evidence as compelling as the murder weapon -- which police confiscated during a manhunt for Wilson after he shot and killed two police officers (an unrelated crime) -- wasn't pursued.

It's hard to know what to make of that affidavit Coventry kept in a lock box under his bed for 26 years. At first glance the writing of it looks conscientious and farsighted -- but was it also a way to do nothing and call it something? I couldn't support Kunz and Coventry's long silence but I sympathized with them for the agony it caused them. But on TV Kunz said something bizarre. He said there are probably other attorneys keeping the same sorts of secrets, and "I don't want to be defensive about this, but what makes this case so different is that Dale and I came forward. And that Dale had the good sense to talk to Wilson before his death and get his permission [to speak up after he died]. Without that, we wouldn't be here today."

Perhaps Kunz and Coventry mean to impress us with how little wiggle room the canons of the law allowed them. But if the canons are that absolute and they obey them that absolutely, then they're turning ethics into ideology. I wish Simon had stopped them right there and asked if he'd heard right: Without the permission of Wilson, a street thug, the killer of three men, you would have let him rule you from the grave, while an innocent man continued to rot in prison? I suppose they would have, but I'd much rather believe they had no intention of allowing such a travesty and realized that if they asked Wilson’s permission he might refuse it—and might even put his refusal in writing. No, I'd much rather they were telling us a white lie now than believe that they'd actually have let those canons keep Logan in prison forever. 

After my reporting on this case Kunz made a fascinating reply -- which he frames as a letter to Wilson (scroll down to "Of All the Lawyers in the World . . ."). And here's a link to John Conroy's report on the Alton Logan case Monday morning on WBEZ. Conroy began covering covering Andrew Wilson for the Reader in 1990 in the context of his pivotal role, as a victim who sued the city, in the uncovering of police torture in Chicago. His last Reader piece examines the status of the scandal now that Wilson has died.

Logan's attorney, Harold Winston, was in court Monday trying to get Logan a new trial. The lawyers' affidavit is one piece of new evidence and Winston has more -- witnesses who never testified at the first trial in 1982. On Monday circuit judge James Schreier listened to the account of Marc Miller, an attorney now living in Florida who back then represented Logan's codefendant, Edgar Hope. Miller's story is that Hope told him Logan was innocent and ordered him to pass that information on to Logan's lawyer. Miller says Hope told him he had only one partner in crime and that was Andrew Wilson, which Miller could find out for himself just by asking around on the street; Hope didn't even know Logan. Miller and Kunz and Coventry were all members of the homicide task force of the Cook County public defender's office; Miller passed on to them almost immediately what Hope had said. They asked Wilson -- was that you in the McDonald's? -- and Wilson said it was. (Miller was much more circumspect with Logan's trial lawyer, whom he didn't know.)

The third signature on the affidavit was that of Andrea Lyon, the public defender who notarized it. The fourth signature was that of Miller. He testified Monday over the objections of assistant attorney general Richard Schwind and Edgar Hope's current lawyer, Richard Kling. Hope's trying to overturn his life sentence on the grounds that he's innocent too. The affidavit and Miller's testimony both implicate him in the crime he says he didn't commit. 

Winston's been hoping that Schreier will order a new trial or, even better, that the attorney general's office will free Logan. But Schreier merely scheduled another hearing for April 18. "They are quick to convict but they are slow to correct their mistakes," Alton Logan told Simon on 60 Minutes.

There will be more here and elsewhere. ABC World News is working up a story of its own.

The new leaner, meaner, more melancholy Reader has come in for a little sympathy from New York Times media writer David Carr. A former editor of the Reader's sister paper in Washington, D.C., the Washington City Paper, Carr's Monday column tells the story of the Reader's devastating layoffs last week (City Paper took the same kind of beating) by focusing on John Conroy, one of the four writers dismissed here. Last week, after the city of Chicago reached settlement agreements with four men who had accused its police officers of torturing them, Conroy received a note that may have given him some consolation. It said:

“My son, Aaron Patterson, tortured by the Chicago Police Department, would not be alive today, I believe, without your articles about police torture in the City of Chicago. You documented and wrote the realization of police torture, of which we will never forget. You help save my son’s life for which I thank you.”

Letters like that don't pay the doctor's bills, but they make it easier for an out-of-work investigative reporter to manage a decent night's sleep. Under journalism's new business model, Carr broods, "the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it’s just overhead," and he observes, "Thousands of bloggers could type for a millennium and not come up with the kind of deeply reported story that freed innocent men."

The other three writers that the Reader let go last week are Tori Marlan, Steve Bogira, and Harold Henderson, whom the Reader billed as "the world's first blogger" and who will continue blogging offsite. Given the circumstances, Harold has done something remarkably gracious: on his new blog he's posted a link to the Web site of Reader contributor Lee Sandlin, and urged his readers to go there and read Sandlin's tribute to this paper's "currently embattled editor." That's Alison True, who under a cost-slashing mandate from the new owners, Creative Loafing of Tampa, Florida, executed last week's massacre. She's taking a beating for that -- but read what Sandlin has to say.

I found myself sharing a table with Dawn Clark Netsch at a dinner last week and she said she'd noticed changes in the Reader. Was the paper OK? "We've got a story on page one by John Conroy," I said, and that was answer enough. A week later I'd have had to say no. John -- and Tori Marlan, Harold Henderson, and Steve Bogira -- were no longer with the Reader.

Laying off these staff writers, which editor Alison True did at the beginning of this week, was surely one of the hardest acts of her life and certainly a low point in the history of this newspaper. "Over the years," True said Thursday in a message to the staff, " John, Harold, Tori, and Steve have produced some of our most important and exciting stories. Their achievements have included brilliant investigative work, prestigious awards, and possibly most important, spurring social change in a city that always needs it. . . . I can't emphasize enough that this action in no way reflects a judgment on the value of the work of these particular writers, and in fact it's my fervent hope that they'll continue to work with us on a contractual basis."

They're gone because the Reader couldn't afford to go on paying them their salaries -- "As you might guess, this move represents a shift in the financial structure of our relationship with contributors," True wrote.

They're gone because a few years ago Craigslist moved in on our classifieds section -- and classifieds represented a huge portion of our income. They're gone because the old Section One -- the editorial section -- was for decades the tail that wagged the dog here, and when revenues fell it became impossible to continue to allocate the same funds to it.

I called the boss, Ben Eason, in Tampa and reminded him that the last time we'd talked he was saying John Conroy deserved a Pulitzer Prize. (That's a popular idea around here. He's been writing about police torture since 1990, but there's no Pulitzer for persistence, no matter how important the subject.) The first time Eason and I talked, just after Eason had bought the paper this summer, I said that Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine -- as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK. 

"I know, I know," said Eason, who was informed of True's intentions before she made her move. "All I've done is, I've said this is what the budget number is. This is what we’ve got to have. And it’s the same number that’s been out there since August."

Eason and Creative Loafing have some interesting, and let's hope brilliant, ideas about the future of the Reader and the CL chain of six newspapers. "It's ultimately to me a navigation problem," Eason told me. "How do you keep putting out a newspaper at a quality people expect and how do you migrate this stuff to the Web, which is ultimately the future? We’re in a fight over who can tell you more about the street corner in Chicago. You've got a mobile phone and you're hungry or you want to rent an apartment and you're consulting your cell phone, and its going to be Google or Yahoo and they’re getting their information from somebody. Those guys" -- Yahoo, Google -- "they’re not even pretending to be journalists," said Eason.  But "we're the journalism right behind them, the stories and information that's still the most comprehensive and best stuff out there. But the challenge is make that turn. I guess I felt that if I was doing fundamental damage to the Reader I wouldn't have bought the Reader."

While writing for the Reader, Conroy's published acclaimed books on Northern Ireland and torture. Bogira, who's been on leave working on a book, published a terrific book on Chicago's criminal courts, Courtroom 302, that HBO is planning to turn into a miniseries. Our last cover story by Marlan, who recently completed a Patterson Fellowship, concerned a Yemeni student who's still being held prisoner in Guantanamo two years after he was recommended for release. Henderson blogged for us, tossed off features on just about anything, and had the most eclectic mind at the paper. Does their departure do fundamental damage to the Reader? 

I want to say no, because the remaining staff is top drawer. But I expect readers to mourn the departed. Newspapers haven't come to the point where no one will notice.

The Tribune -- where more than 50 editorial people just signed up to take the latest buyout offer -- is likely to get sloppier with its detail work before it gets better. Here's a taste of where things may be headed. A headline in Monday's paper says "Cop reverses on shooting / Officer now says use of gun in '03 case was unjustified." 

Now says? The officer was Alvin Weems, who in the aftermath of a melee four years ago at the 95th Street Red Line station shot a man in the head. The basis of the Tribune story was a deposition Weems gave on December 20 -- five months ago -- in which, contrary to what he'd claimed earlier, he said his action "wasn't justified." The only thing that's happened since then is that on April 20 the Reader put the shooting in the public eye, publishing John Conroy's account and posting the story and a security-camera video of the fatal shooting on our Web site. Weems's recantation was covered in Conroy's story, which the Tribune didn't mention. Maybe reporter David Heinzmann didn't know about it -- his story's erroneous description of the shooting (Weems wasn't trying to pull someone off another man when he pointed at Pleasance and fired) suggests he never watched the video (or read the frame-by-frame blog discussion of it by his colleague Eric Zorn).

The Sun-Times published its version of the Weems-says-whoops story back on May 14, which may be why the Trib's weighing in now. The Sun-Times didn't mention Conroy's story either, but at least it didn't focus on last year's deposition.

Tony Lagouranis, the former army interrogator who's the subject of John Conroy's cover story in the March 2 Reader, has a name that might ring a bell. Lagouranis is spreading the message that while working for the army in Iraq he tortured detainees, and to no useful end, and among his public appearances is the one in a recent New Yorker article on the TV show 24 . Lagouranis was part of a delegation led by the dean of the U.S. Military Academy that met last November with the show's creative team to protest its free and easy use of torture. "In Iraq," Lagouranis tells the magazine, "I never saw pain produce intelligence." 24's having a rocky year. I watch it faithfully as a guilty pleasure, but pleasure is more evanescent than guilt and the show everybody celebrated last season now seems to have a lot of people feeling queasy.

Consider this discussion of the show's troubling "political theology." I can't be that lofty. 24 is television, so I'll compare it to another show: Medium, whose hero has the knack of being able to solve crimes in her sleep. Toward the end of the one episode I've seen -- my brother-in-law played the murder victim -- the show wasn't anywhere close to tying up its loose ends and there were only a couple minutes to go till the credits. So the writers sent the hero back to bed. In her dream all was revealed. It was the silliest thing my wife and I had ever seen. Yet in 24 torture functions in the same way. The show pretends to be complicated, but it's got a mass audience it can't afford to confuse, so it's really just The Perils of Pauline (or Jack Bauer) gussied up with outlandish plot twists. Any suspense is over whether the writers will paint themselves into a corner they can't get out of. And since the present peril has to be resolved by the end of the hour so the show can get on to the next one, plot expedients are necessary and torture's the favorite.

Torture moves things along. Besides, it doesn't really hurt. Have we all forgotten the terrible things that the Arab extremists did to Jack within an hour after he got off the plane from China already a wreck? To quote no less an authority than the official 24 Web site: "Fayed pierces the bundle of nerves on Jack's shoulder with a knife." And then, "Fayed stabs Jack in the back with something sharp, causing Jack to keel over." Bauer got out of that one and I don't think he slowed down long enough to dab those pierced nerves with Mercurochrome. But 24 is a show where even death is reversible. At least Jack's was (season two). Lagouranis says in the New Yorker that interrogators he knew in Iraq watched 24 to pick up tips on how to make prisoners come clean. That's scary -- the business end of our intelligence pipeline consists of guys who watch Kiefer Sutherland earn his half million dollars an episode and think they're all in the same line of work.

The Tribune and Sun-Times reported Thursday that convicted murderer Darrell Cannon wants to add Mayor Richard Daley and former mayor Jane Byrne to his federal lawsuit, which alleges that his confession was extracted by torture. When Cannon was convicted, 1984, Byrne was mayor and Daley was state's attorney, and Commander Jon Burge--who would be thrown off the police force amid allegations of torture in 1993--was still running Area Two, where the detectives who arrested Cannon worked. The murder conviction was vacated in 1997, but Cannon remains in prison for violating parole in connection with a 1971 murder. Of all the cases involving Burge's accusers, Cannon's is one of the most complicated and important. You'll find the full story in our archive of work by Reader staff writer John Conroy, who's been writing about Burge since 1990.

UPDATE: As is pointed out in this item's comments section, Jane Byrne was no longer mayor when Cannon was convicted in 1984, nor was she mayor at the time of the 1983 murder he was convicted of. Attorney Flint Taylor tells me he wants to add Byrne to the lawsuit on the grounds that while mayor, from 1979 to 1983, she encouraged the kind of aggressive police tactics that spawned torture and did not respond to information she received from her police superintendent that it might be taking place.

Last week Dorothy Brown, clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court and a candidate for mayor of Chicago. wrote a letter to U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald expressing concern that the local courts have been involved in a "massive cover-up" of police torture by former commander Jon Burge and some of his detectives. "The latest article in the Chicago Reader, by reporter John Conroy, couldn't make the case more clear," she told Fitzgerald, and asked him to investigate. On Friday morning, December 8, she held a news conference at the Federal Center to discuss her letter and the alleged cover-up.

Here at the Reader we wondered if the coverage would mention Conroy and our paper. We were asking the wrong question. The right question was: Would the coverage mention Brown? Would there even be coverage?

In a day when the media were preoccupied with the killings at the Ogilvie Center, Brown pretty much struck out.

Her spokesman, John Davis, says the news conference drew a big crowd but nobody reported on it. The Tribune ignored the subject she raised until Monday, when it published a long article reporting that Mayor Daley was about to announce his own candidacy. Deep in that article was this paragraph: "Police brutality and other wrongdoing by officers, as well as the alleged torture of suspects by former Cmdr. Jon Burge, is another campaign issue being pressed by the challengers."

The Sun-Times included in its own Monday article on Daley a chat with Jacky Grimshaw, who ran intergovernmental affairs under Mayor Harold Washington. Grimshaw said the mayor's challengers lack "gravitas," and Brown "seems to be running an invisible campaign."