Judge: Defense Attorney Withheld Evidence in Infamous Police Murder Case…

Judge Acquits Cook County Prosecutors Charged During Reign of Kim Foxx

Declaring that a defense attorney representing a man charged for his role in an infamous 1982 double murder of two police officers “deliberately withheld evidence” from prosecutors, a judge acquitted two long-serving prosecutors of wrongdoing in a criminal trial on Wednesday.

In his ruling, Judge Daniel Shanes stated that defense attorney Elliot Slosar, from one of the city’s most powerful wrongful convictions firms, withheld key evidence in the criminal retrial of Jackie Wilson, who, along with his brother Andrew Wilson, was convicted multiple times for the murders of two police officers during a traffic stop in 1982 on the city’s South Side.

The 1982 police murder case is perhaps the most seminal wrongful conviction case in the state’s history because Andrew Wilson was clearly beaten while in police custody after he showed up at Central Detention badly bruised—bruises that paved the way for claims of torture against Chicago police. Jackie Wilson also claimed abuse by police. The murders and abuse allegations arose during a macabre month in 1982 in which five police officers were gunned down, four fatally.

Andrew Wilson died in prison.

Jackie Wilson’s claims of abuse ultimately paved the way for another criminal trial, which took place in 2020, when Jackie Wilson was represented by Slosar. By the end of that criminal trial, Jackie Wilson not only beat the charges for his role in the murder of the two officers, but two prosecutors, Nicolas Trutenko and Andrew Horvat, were fired and would ultimately face their own criminal charges.

For police and prosecutors, the turnabout was a chilling sign of how powerful the exoneration movement had become in Illinois. For the exoneration advocates, it was a powerful sign of their ascendancy that ultimately hit a major roadblock as defense attorneys for Trutenko and Horvat steadily dissected the case through powerful cross-examinations, evidence gathering, and compelling arguments—a dissection that left their clients wholly acquitted and the judge castigating the conduct of several players who built the case against Horvat and Trutenko, including Slosar.

“Slosar, for his part, deliberately withheld evidence from [special prosecutors], prioritizing courtroom theatrics over his own legal obligations,” Shanes said. “Slosar’s conduct fell short of the ‘special responsibility for the quality of justice’ expected of Illinois attorneys.”

“The evidence is overwhelming that the defense withheld evidence in the 2020 trial,” said James McKay, an attorney for Trutenko, who had twice successfully prosecuted Wilson for the murders.

Judge Shanes targeted not only the conduct of Slosar, but also the special prosecutors appointed to try Wilson for the murders, Myles O’Rourke and Lawrence Rosen.

During the 2020 criminal trial against Wilson, O’Rourke and Rosen had stated that a key witness could not be found. Slosar, possessing the copy of a baptismal certificate that showed the witness and Trutenko were well acquainted, called Trutenko to the stand and asked Trutenko if he knew about the whereabouts of the witness. Trutenko admitted he was in regular contact with the man.

With this humiliating revelation for O’Rourke and Rosen, the two attorneys dropped charges midway through the trial in a seeming panic over Trutenko’s admission contradicting their claims the witness could not be found, a decision that garnered strong criticism from Judge Shanes on Tuesday.

“As the evidence makes clear, Rosen and O’Rourke delivered a subpar performance in Wilson’s complex 2020 murder trial,” Shanes said. “At trial had Trutenko’s testimony been as surprising and pivotal as Rosen and O’Rourke apparently believed, they had multiple tools and options at their disposal to address it,” Shane said.

Within hours of the criminal case imploding against Wilson, Trutenko and Horvat were bizarrely fired from their prosecutor positions under Kimberly Foxx. Another special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the two men, ultimately leading to criminal charges.

In his acquittal, Trutenko praised Judge Shanes and called the verdict a victory for all prosecutors in Cook County in the face of a powerful exoneration movement that more and more includes allegations of wrongdoing against prosecutors, particularly during the era of former top prosecutor Foxx.

“Had this experimental prosecution been successful, this would have opened up another revenue stream for [the] exoneration movement which is running rampantly out of control in this town,” Trutenko said.

A host of compelling questions and observations emerge after this verdict in the case and the statements by Judge Shanes.

In the wake of Judge Shanes’s ruling and legal analysis indicating Trutenko and Horvat committed no crime, two question remain: Why were they fired by Kimberly Foxx? Why wasn’t Foxx troubled by the “deliberate withholding of evidence” by Slosar as Judge Shanes was?

Next, why was Slosar’s “deliberate withholding of evidence” so apparent to Trutenko’s defense attorneys and Judge Shanes, but not the Wilson trial judge, William Hooks? Hooks’s failure to address the suspicious manner by which Slosar presented the surprise document adds to the sentiment that Hooks ran a shockingly biased trial. This bias was intensified when Hooks made the decision to grant a certificate of innocence to Jackie Wilson, despite the overwhelming evidence he had participated in the 1982 murder of the two police officers.

Trutenko’s point that the criminal case against Horvat and him put all prosecutors at risk of being dragged into exoneration cases as defendants is crucial. Imagine if the case against Trutenko and Horvat took shape in a courtroom ruled by one of the many activist judges in Cook County and they were found guilty. An avalanche of similar cases would emerge against these prosecutors and their colleagues, a legal bloodbath no doubt dear to the malevolent hearts of Chicago’s radical left. Does allegedly reform-minded top prosecutor Eileen O’Neill Burke recognize the significance of the criminal case against Trutenko and Horvat? Does she see how close all prosecutors came to being targeted by the exoneration movement? Will she aggressively protect her staff in future legal campaigns against prosecutors?

Then, of course, there is the Chicago media. When the Wilson criminal case imploded in the circus of Judge Hooks’s courtroom, a media frenzy followed, the frenzy enduring as charges were eventually made against Trutenko and Horvat. At the acquittal on Wednesday, only two media outlets attended. One was the Chicago Tribune, with journalist Christy Gutowski’s subsequent article on the acquittal not even mentioning the fact that Judge Shanes stated Slosar had “deliberately withheld evidence” in the case. If such an allegation was made against a cop or prosecutor by a judge in a murder trial, it would have initiated dozens of articles by Chicago “journalists” all pushing for some form of investigation.

Such selective, biased media coverage is one more example that the media, like Foxx, may be in bed with the exoneration movement. Such a collusion would explain how the media, and not the evidence in cases, is often the driving force in the courts, an influence Judge Shanes courageously shrugged off in his ruling to acquit Trutenko and Horvat, a ruling deeply rooted in the law and legal precedent.

Sensing this likely possibility in the course of watching Judge Shanes during the trial may be one reason most of the Chicago media suddenly abandoned the verdict announcement and stayed away.

Such courage. Such integrity.

Thanks to the outstanding work of defense attorneys James McKay, Brian Sexton, and Terrence Ekl defending the former prosecutors in the courtroom of Judge Shanes, Trutenko and Horvat won a huge battle.

But Jackie Wilson, already twice convicted of the killings, is free from charges and won a $17 million settlement from the county. Two officers are deceased.

Winning a battle is not winning a war.