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Post by maddogblues on Jan 21, 2010 0:43:59 GMT -5
www.alternet.org/rights/145191/muckraking_alternet_coverage_exposes_wrongful_incarceration/"On Thursday, January 14th, Michael Tillman walked out of the Cook County Courthouse and headed straight for Mac Arthur's Restaurant, a soul food institution on Chicago's West Side. After 23 years of being wrongfully incarcerated and facing a life behind bars, the barbeque ribs tasted particularly sweet. About an hour earlier, Cook County Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan had dismissed the original 1986 murder, rape and kidnapping charges that had kept Tillman locked away in Illinois prisons since he was 21. Those charges were based on a confession that Tillman says was tortured out of him by officers under the command of former Chicago Police Detective Jon Burge. Prosecutors declined to bring new charges against Tillman and, after attorneys faxed some paperwork to the Illinois Department of Corrections, he was free to go. It was a long road to justice, a journey that gained critical momentum after a July 2008 investigative story in AlterNet, written by Chicago-based reporter Jessica Pupovac, tipped area lawyers off to the facts of Tillman's case."
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