The law is one thing, common sense another, but we like to think of the two of them as living together in harmony, each the other’s biggest supporter. When the relationship breaks down and the law moves out, most of us should have no trouble taking sides. John Conroy (on WBEZ) and Maurice Possley (in the Tribune) recently reported on two lawyers, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, who have known since 1982 that an innocent man was behind bars for a murder their own client committed. The reporters explained the legal reason for this travesty: the absolutism of the client-attorney privilege, which guarantees that anything a client tells his lawyers will be kept in confidence forever. That reason didn’t satisfy me, and it didn’t satisfy the dozens of readers who responded online. Here’s a typical comment posted to the Tribune‘s Web site: “It’s time we get real justice in the USA, instead of the lawyers games.”
Coventry and Kunz were members of the public defender’s office’s homicide task force representing Wilson in the murders of police officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. Those murders took place on February 9, 1982. Marc Miller, another task force member, represented Edgar Hope. Hope was accused of shooting to death a police officer on a CTA bus on East 79th Street on February 5, and also accused of being one of two armed men who staged a holdup at a McDonald’s on South Halsted on January 11. During that robbery security guard Lloyd Wickliffe was killed by a shotgun blast and another guard was wounded. A gun taken from Hope when he was arrested for the CTA killing was traced to the wounded McDonald’s security guard.
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Andrea Lyon, today the director of the DePaul Center for Justice in Capital Cases and in 1982 a member of the public defender’s homicide task force, notarized the affidavit. A notary doesn’t have to read the document she’s notarizing, but Lyon not only read and understood the affidavit, to the best of her recollection she wrote it. She says she’d written motions for Coventry and Kunz on Wilson’s behalf and considered him to be, as a practical matter, her client too. She felt just as bound to silence as her colleagues.
Alton Logan is still trying to get out of prison. His present lawyer, public defender Harold Winston, knew nothing about the affidavit, but he’d heard rumors that Kunz and Coventry had learned something from Wilson that would help Logan’s case. On November 29 Winston picked up a Reader and encountered, on the front page, a story by John Conroy announcing Wilson’s death. “He will long be remembered,” wrote Conroy, “not only for his crime but for his pivotal role in what followed—the exposure of torture within the police department.”
“Open it!” said Kunz, and Coventry did.
Responsibility for Logan’s imprisonment certainly doesn’t begin with these lawyers. Kunz says more than a year went by before the police, answering a subpoena for documents, revealed the link between the recovered shotgun and the McDonald’s job. “When we talked to Wilson and he said he’d done it, we believed him,” says Kunz, “but we didn’t know that corroborative evidence existed.” Coventry asks, “Who was Edgar Hope’s [regular] partner? Andrew Wilson. Who had the shotgun? Who’d killed the cops?” The answers—Wilson and Wilson.
