Jan. 08--One of the enduring mysteries in what's commonly known as the Anthony Porter case was why a skeptical Cook County grand jury nevertheless returned a murder indictment against another man, Alstory Simon, after hearing dramatically conflicting testimony in early 1999.
That mystery is now solved.
I'll explain how, but first, let me set it up for you.
In 1982, a young couple was shot to death in Washington Square Park. Porter, a local thug, was fingered by witnesses, convicted and sentenced to death, a story that got almost no media attention at the time.
Porter was a little more than 50 hours from a lethal injection in the fall of 1998 when the Illinois Supreme Court granted him a stay based on claims he was mentally unfit for execution. This touched off a reinvestigation of his case by a Northwestern University team that ended a little more than four months later when Simon confessed to the murders in a video recorded by a volunteer private detective working with the NU team.
Porter walked free, prompting then-Gov. George Ryan to begin the soul-searching that prompted him several years later to empty out death row, which led, ultimately, to the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.
Simon pleaded guilty in open court, offered an emotional apology to the victims' families and headed off to prison. Years later, then, in what looked like a futile act of remorse, Simon changed his mind and attempted to withdraw his guilty plea. He didn't kill those people, he said. He was tricked and suckered into confessing.
Lawyers and others who took up Simon's cause pointed to a strange wrinkle in the proceedings. To accept Simon's guilty plea, the Cook County state's attorney's office first had to secure a grand jury indictment against him.
But instead of getting a quick, pro forma rubber stamp, Assistant State's Attorney Thomas Gainer conducted what amounted to a mini-trial in February 1999. Available transcripts run 433 pages and show Gainer using a parade of witnesses to build the case that, Simon's confession notwithstanding, Porter was actually the gunman.
In some of the questions that members of the grand jury asked witnesses, they revealed their doubts about Simon's guilt and about the integrity of the Northwestern investigation.
So why did they vote to indict him?
That question acquired new salience Oct. 30 when Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez announced that her office had reviewed the case against Simon and found it so flawed that she was dropping the charges. She singled out the citizen sleuths and Simon's pro bono defense attorney for failing to protect Simon's constitutional rights.
And the answer to that question is that they didn't.
A nearly 4,700-word article published this week by the Chicago Reader, amplifying an earlier blog posting by Chicago police Officer Martin Preib, revealed that the skeptical grand jury disbanded, on schedule, without taking action. And that Gainer then brought the case to a separate grand jury that sat in March 1999.
That grand jury heard from three witnesses, none of whom implicated Porter, and quickly returned the necessary indictment. And as the Cook County state's attorney's office confirms, the relevant transcript runs just 33 pages.
Gainer, now an associate Cook County judge, declined to comment on this seeming about-face when I reached him by phone Thursday.
Former Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine, then Gainer's boss, wrote in a Tribune op-ed about the case last week that "The prosecutors ... presented evidence to the grand jury about the case -- not only evidence pointing toward Simon but also evidence implicating Porter. After reviewing the evidence, the grand jury indicted Simon for the murders."
When I asked him via email to square this assertion with the emerging story about the use of two grand juries, he wrote, "I was not among the ASAs (assistant state's attorneys) who worked with the grand jury, so I cannot comment on specifics about the process."
Devine contended, however, that, like the rest of us, he was unaware at the time "of any claim of innocence by Alstory Simon," and he took the opportunity to once again distance himself from the claim of Thomas Epach, then the chief of criminal prosecutions for Devine, that he, Epach, had raised multiple, serious concerns about the case in 1999.
Those serious concerns are, however, on display in the transcript from the first grand jury. We now know how those concerns were made to disappear.
The remaining mystery, after all these years, is why.
Twitter @ericzorn
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