A Cook County judge denied a request Monday to have a special prosecutor investigate allegations that police and prosecutors hid evidence from lawyers for three men charged with the 2011 murder of a Chicago police officer.
After rejecting the request, Judge James Linn set a hearing for Friday on a motion for a new trial for Alexander Villa, who was convicted in 2019 as one of the gunmen in the slaying of Officer Clifton Lewis.
Such motions are seldom granted, however, and sentencing is likely to soon follow ahead of Linn’s planned retirement this month.
In seeking a special prosecutor, Villa’s lawyers cited a trove of emails discovered years after his trial that they claim show police and prosecutors withheld evidence, including cellphone data that showed Villa and two other suspects, Tyrone Clay and Edgardo Colon, were not at the crime scene when Lewis was killed.
Charges against Clay and Colon were dropped in June at a hearing where prosecutors Andrew Varga and Nancy Adduci had been set to testify about the allegations.
Linn also quashed subpoenas for Adduci and Varga, noting that he didn’t need to know the prosecutors’ state of mind or reasons the evidence wasn’t turned over.
“I don’t need to know the why. I need to know what [was withheld] and would it have made a difference” in the guilty verdict reached by a jury in 2019, Linn said.
The Lewis murder case has moved slowly through the courthouse at 26th and California, where high-profile cases can take years to go to trial.
Colon was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to more than 80 years, but his conviction was overturned because police obtained his confession — which he later recanted — after he had repeatedly asked for a lawyer.
Clay spent 12 years in jail following his arrest and was still awaiting trial when the case against him was dropped in June.
Villa’s lawyers maintained that the evidence they uncovered while preparing Villa’s motion for a new trial was behind the decision by the state’s attorney’s office to drop the cases against Colon and Clay.
Varga and Adduci were taken off the case in January, a sign that the state’s attorney’s office believed their continued involvement in the case presented a conflict of interest, Villa’s lawyers argued.
Villa’s lawyers filed their motion for special prosecutor with the presiding judge of the Criminal Division, Erica Reddick. She had presided over Clay’s and Colon’s cases and last year issued a sweeping order to turn over CPD records about a massive joint dragnet with federal investigators that targeted the Lewis suspects and the Spanish Cobras street gang.
After taking the weekend to review the case, Reddick sent the case back to Linn on Monday morning. It was not clear whether lawyers for Clay or Colon might also ask Reddick for a special prosecutor to investigate the Lewis case.
Attending the hearing online Monday, Clay’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, noted that the case had harmed her client and that “civil penalties” were likely — meaning a lawsuit would be filed.
“My client served 12 years in the Cook County Jail and ultimately all charges were dropped,” she said. “And the reason for that ... was rampant prosecutorial misconduct.”
