Could Cold Case Unit Finally Hold Chicago Media Accountable?
Judicial Watch Request Paves the Way for Reform in Chicago crime, first step in saving taxpayers millions?
Has Philadelphia found a way to finally to restore the justice system in big cities and hold the media accountable?
The question emerges in the wake of a letter sent by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, requesting that the Chicago Police Department take up the infamous rape and murder case of Antwinica Bridgeman in an Englewood basement as a cold case investigation.
The request comes in the wake of a move by the Philadelphia Police Department to create a new cold case unit to investigate murders that ended up in exonerations. According to news reports, the first two investigations of the Philadelphia police unit concluded that the police got the right guys, despite the convictions of the offenders being tossed.
Such an outcome could take place in the case of Nevest Coleman and Darryl Fulton, “exonerated” for their role in the 1994 rape and murder of Bridgeman. Bridgeman was found in Coleman’s basement. She had been impaled through her vagina, and her face had been bashed in by a brick.
Coleman’s advocates claimed the offender was another person, a serial rapist, whose DNA was identified years after the murder when more sophisticated tests were developed. This sample was paraded by Coleman and Fulton’s advocates, and by Tribune scribes Gregory Pratt and Eric Zorn, as compelling evidence of the men’s innocence. Indeed, Zorn penned a column virtually demanding that Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx, a stalwart ally of the exoneration movement, release the men.
But the detectives in this case, long accused by the Chicago media as being dirty cops, have stood by their investigations in this and other cases and have testified in numerous depositions and legal proceedings. They counter that myriad explanations could account for the semen sample by another man, including the claim it could have existed up to two weeks before Bridgeman was murdered.
Then a bombshell was delivered in the case that went completely uncovered by the Chicago media. Foxx’s top prosecutor stated under oath that he concluded the men were culpable in the crime and that the detectives did nothing wrong. The prosecutor specifically cited Zorn’s article as contradicting the evidence in the case.
Ironically, both Zorn and Pratt have been on social media of late, ranting and raving about critical comments made by Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s son, whom Proft and Jacobson did not know is special needs when they made the comments. Both Proft and Jacobson immediately apologized for their comments.
Yet the statement under oath by a former top prosecutor about Zorn’s column in the murder case of a young woman got no coverage in the Chicago media whatsoever, a sign that Chicago lacks a functioning, independent press.
Chicago is facing a budget shortfall nearing one billion dollars. That debt is driven in large part by the exoneration movement. Attorneys on both sides of the cases are raking in vast sums of money, dragging the cases on in federal lawsuits for years, then the city attorneys are suddenly announcing to the city council it would be cheaper to settle. The claim is a lie because every settlement only encourages another legal grifter into the game, and more bogus claims of police misconduct trumpeted by the likes of Zorn, Pratt, and their media comrades. The city council is hardly a collection of competent statesmen and -women. With a few exceptions, they do what the lawyers tell them. They settle. Taxpayers are the chumps.
Zorn and Pratt are likely waiting and hoping for the city’s typical throwing in of the towel. Then, surely, they will have something to say about the case. Until then, mum’s the word on the bombshell statements by a top prosecutor that their media coverage and its influence upon Kim Foxx’s decision making remain sealed in the vault of the city’s ministry of propaganda.
Certainly no one in the Chicago media will cover the request by Judicial Watch for the police to take up the case as a cold case. But such an investigation could change the dynamic and the outcomes of this movement.
There is and has been a battle in Chicago between the police and the media. The media is on the side of the anti-police movement and benefited mightily by the election of Kim Foxx as top prosecutor. She funneled one ludicrous exoneration case after another through the courts, leaving the media dogs drooling in ecstasy. In return, they protected her administration from any journalism that would expose the depravity and consequences of her reign of legal terror.
Time to sort it all out, starting with the Nevest Coleman cold case.
Incredible.
Great work, Marty!
The Georgia Innocence Project's first client, Joseph Lee Brown, was trumpeted as a victim of inter-racial oppression until DNA evidence, on top of all the other evidence, such as a confession by his fellow burglar, and the stolen car with Brown's wallet found in it, proved that he did brutally rape a woman who was clearing out her recently-deceased boyfriend's house -- after she returned from his funeral that same day.
Upon learning that her first client was indeed guilty based also on DNA, Aimee Maxwell, the head of that Innocence Project, actually went before the media and called this a victory for the rape victim, because the victim could really be sure the right man was in prison. But Maxwell surely knew her client was guilty all along, given all the other evidence against him. Maxwell also called the Innocence Project a "jackpot" for prisoners at a time when she had 1,150 requests for exoneration and had found only one case to try -- which turned out to be a false claim of innocence. Soon after, Georgia's DNA database achieved a very different milestone, linking 285 unsolved crimes in Georgia and 48 in other states to DNA samples taken from convicted felons. The vast majority of these crimes were rapes. A huge proportion had previously pled down to burglary or drug possession from sex crime charges.
For a few years, the Innocence Project did indeed free a few hundred men whose DNA did not match a crime scene, and many, though not all of these men did not have additional evidence to place them at the scene of the crime, though some unknown number of them did. Others had already been in the system after pleading down from rape to lesser charges in cases with other strong evidence, such as the much-feted-and-paid Calvin Johnson, or were participants who left no DNA and never said they did, like the Central Park Five.
Out of their small, if individually significant pool of men, the Innocence Project created completely fictitious "statistics" to invent a "science of innocence" that has since been taught in law schools and used as evidence and has entered the public consciousness (thus juries) through the media.
Meanwhile, as thousands of lawyers, donors, and law and journalism students eagerly search for innocent men in prison (DNA rarely factors in anymore -- those cases cleared rapidly), practically nobody is advocating for -- and no academic I've found is researching -- following up on virtually any of the hundreds of thousands of DNA hits for rape and rape-murder exposed by DNA databases, save for a few volunteers and cold case detectives looking mostly at serial killers with high body counts.
That is, unless the crime is deemed a hate crime because there is a politically correct configuration of offender and victim. And, no, just killing 25 or fifty or 100 women doesn't count as a hate crime.
We need a "science of guilt" that similarly tracks, investigates, and exposes these hundreds of thousands of DNA hits, pressures prosecutors to prosecute -- and explains the significance of this vast number of horrific, never-tried crimes to the public. But nobody in the media cares to do so. And nobody in the media reports the truth about the way courts (not police -- DAs and courts) prosecute serial offenders when they are caught. They're still usually convicted of just one or two crimes, and the rest of the victims are permanently denied justice. Like I was.
Meanwhile, while Martin Prieb singularly fights the fight to expose the Innocence Project's tactics, the many thousands of Innocence Project workers and wannabes use more and more outrageous and flimsy claims to free or try to free actually guilty men. Men like Benjamin LaGuer, who at least died in prison, or Doug Echols and Samuel Scott, who were freed, briefly touted, and remain in the Project's innocence statistics even though they were found to have helped kidnap and hold the victim down as a third man raped her.
At least the state of Georgia, curiously, didn't shower those two with money. But we need a solid review of many, if not most, of the Innocence Project's cases and clients and their invented "science of innocence," as well as just as thorough an investigation of every DNA hit (and other solid evidence) that have still led to no prosecutions.
And if Inocence Project clients have other rape convictions in their past, or if they commit more rapes when wrongly acquitted (both have happened), or if they had been convicted on other strong evidence that is increasingly cast aside in the race to acquit, this needs to be publicized too, and the Innocence Project needs to own up to the lies they told (often about the victim) concerning why these men ended up in a line-up in the first place.
As Aimee Maxwell so grotesquely put it while publicly humiliating a rape victim who turned out to be right, at least then we will know the whole truth of the acquittal industry.