Rare independent review ordered after Lake County prosecutor seeks to toss murder conviction

In an unusual legal twist, a judge has appointed an outside attorney to review a request by Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart to toss out a murder conviction.

Judge Daniel Shanes has directed former Lake County Bar Association President Donald Morrison to handle the inquiry.

Rinehart and Marvin Williford’s lawyer David Owens had filed a joint petition to vacate Wlliford's conviction from more than two decades ago. On April 10, they went to court expecting to make arguments on their petition.

But Shanes slammed on the brakes.

In a four-page order, the judge postponed the hearing and appointed Morrison. He said he wasn’t comfortable with the agreement between the prosecutor and defense attorneys.

“Advocacy from both sides of a case best promotes the ultimate objective that the guilty be convicted and the innocent go free," Shanes wrote. "The adversarial process, vital to the administration of justice, is absent here."

He listed the things he wants Morrison to review, including which of Williford’s legal claims are different from ones he made earlier, whether the judge is bound by an earlier Illinois appeals court decision that upheld Williford’s conviction, and other legal questions.

“I was surprised by the court’s ruling,” Owens told the Chicago Sun-Times.

He says he knows of no other post-conviction hearings in Illinois in which a third-party lawyer — called a “friend of the court” or amicus curiae — was appointed to be an adversary of the defendant.

Contempt of court hearings are about the only ones in which he knows that’s happened, Owens says.

Still, he says he’ll abide by Shanes’ order.

In that order, Shanes cited a 1976 Illinois appeals court case that said it's within the court's discretion to appoint amicus curiae to investigate and conduct a hearing.

Asked about the order, Rinehart released this statement: "The court has brought in research assistance to distill the relevant legal issues around reversing a conviction within the trial court.

"As the prosecutor who is ethically bound to respond to and reverse injustices, I am focused on three aspects of this case: 1) new information about the original investigating detective and confidential informant; 2) new science around the unfairness of certain photo lineup identification procedures; and 3) the meaning of DNA testing results that were not available at the time of the original trial.

"We need to get this right for the family, the defendant and the community,” Rinehart said.

Last month, Rinehart and Owens filed their joint petition to vacate Williford’s 80-year sentence in a home invasion in which Delwin Foxworth was beaten with a 2-by-4, soaked with gasoline and set ablaze in 2000. Foxworth died two years later.

In court, Rinehart has said he doesn’t believe Williford is innocent but still thinks his conviction should be overturned because he didn’t get a fair trial. If Williford’s conviction is vacated, it’s unclear if Rinehart would retry him.

The petition says a North Chicago detective lied on reports and on the witness stand at Williford’s 2004 trial.

The petition also points to new DNA evidence. In recent years, the Lake County state’s attorney’s office conducted a post-trial investigation that included DNA testing. Williford’s DNA wasn’t found on the crime scene evidence, including the board. But DNA on the 2-by-4 was linked to an unidentified man’s semen from the rape of 11-year-old Holly Staker in her 1992 killing in Waukegan.

In 2011, an appeals court overturned Juan Rivera’s conviction in Holly's killing. Rivera got a $20 million settlement in a wrongful conviction lawsuit he filed against Lake County authorities. Since then, no one’s been arrested in Staker’s slaying.

Rinehart’s predecessor had opposed vacating Williford’s conviction. In 2018, Shanes rejected Williford’s request for a new trial, saying the lack of his DNA on the crime scene evidence doesn’t prove his innocence. Shanes also said unreliable identification evidence didn’t violate Williford’s due process rights.

Across the country, legal experts have been grappling with the reluctance of some judges to grant requests from prosecutors to vacate convictions. That discussion intensified last year when a Missouri man was executed over the objections of St. Louis County’s top prosecutor.

In February, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates passed a resolution to help prosecutors trying to vacate wrongful convictions who come up against procedural obstacles or court skepticism, according to the ABA Journal.

The resolution said “appropriate weight” should be given to a prosecutor requesting that a conviction be vacated and “absent compelling evidence in the record to the contrary, that such request be granted.”