Authors: Steve Bogira
Purvy allowed on cross that although he recalled seeing Jones twice in the neighborhood before the attack, he hadn’t known his name until Sheila said it during the attack. The youngster also allowed that he thought his parents were in the bedroom, right next to his room, when he saw the men in the living room, but that he never tried to go to them for help.
Sheila had been found across the width of the bed, legs dangling off the edge, a coat rolled up under her hips; but according to Purvy’s testimony on cross, she was lying in her bed in a normal position when she was hit and when she stopped moving.
To Haas, this was further indication that Purvy’s recollection of the attack was contrived. His testimony on direct was mostly “a lie that he rehearsed,” Haas asserts today. “It was suggested to him.”
Haas says he doesn’t know who did the suggesting or whether it was intentional. “Sometimes police and prosecutors deliberately put information in a witness’s head, knowing it’s probably not true. Sometimes they guess at things with a compliant witness, and the witness repeats what’s said to him.” Because of Purvy’s age, his intellectual deficits, and the injury he suffered, Haas says, “in this case, you were almost starting with a blank slate.”
During Jones’s civil suit five years later, a nationally renowned neurologist would review Purvy’s medical records at Jones’s lawyers’ request. The neurologist, Harold Klawans of Chicago’s Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, had treated hundreds of victims of brain injury, edited two clinical neurology handbooks, and written popular books and dozens of articles on neurology. Klawans told U.S. District Court judge Harry Leinenweber that Purvy had sustained an “extremely serious” injury involving both frontal lobes of his brain. The medical records indicated that when Purvy emerged from his coma several days after the attack, he’d been disoriented for nearly a month—he’d had trouble answering even simple questions put to him by medical personnel. The records also indicated that Purvy tended to “perseverate,” Klawans said. The doctor explained that “perseveration” involves making a response that appears to be appropriate, then continuing to repeat that answer “when the answer may no longer have any relevance whatsoever.”
Moreover, Klawans told Judge Leinenweber, Purvy likely had no memory of the attack. Almost everyone who loses consciousness after a head injury suffers some amnesia, he said. In less serious cases, it may be limited to the blow that caused the injury, and it may be temporary. But victims of head injuries as serious as Purvy’s almost inevitably suffer some “retrograde amnesia”—a loss of memory of the period from the moment of the injury, backward. The longer the coma, the longer the period of retrograde amnesia. Given the length of Purvy’s coma, Klawans said, it was likely that Purvy had permanently lost any memory of what had happened for “at least a half hour and up to hours, perhaps even longer,” before he was struck.
Klawans also said it was “extremely common” for victims of head trauma to “confabulate”—to fill their memory gaps with details they themselves make up, or that they hear from others. As they become less disoriented, their tendency to confabulate diminishes, he said. “But often what they remember is what they confabulated.”
“I don’t necessarily agree with that opinion,” Locallo says today of Klawans’s views. “All I know is what Purvy told me.”
DESPITE PURVY
’
S STRUGGLES
on cross-examination, Jones’s lawyers hardly felt confident after the youngster finished testifying. “These are the cases where you get wrongful convictions,” Haas says. “There’s a horrific crime. The prosecutor shows the jury the victim and points at the defendant.”
And the jury got a vivid reminder of the horror of the crime near the end of Purvy’s direct examination. Haas feared that what happened then might overshadow the flaws in Purvy’s subsequent testimony on cross.
Locallo pulled out People’s Exhibit Number 27—Sheila’s bloodstained terry-cloth shirt—and asked Purvy if he could identify it.
Purvy screamed.
“That’s my sister’s shirt!” he wailed, bursting into tears. Judge Cousins quickly called a recess and had the jury ushered out. Purvy was helped down from the stand and led from the courtroom “still hysterical,” the
Tribune
would report the following day.
Haas and Schmiedel were livid. They demanded that Cousins declare a mistrial. Haas accused Locallo of inciting Purvy’s reaction to elicit more sympathy for the youth from the jury. Locallo responded that he’d told the defense lawyers he was going to show the shirt to Purvy, and that they hadn’t objected as he’d laboriously removed it from a plastic bag before displaying it. Cousins said there’d be no mistrial. When the jurors returned to the courtroom, he admonished them “not to allow any sympathy … for the victim or for the victim’s family” to influence their decision.
Locallo still recalls Purvy’s “bloodcurdling” scream, but he says he was as surprised as anyone by it. He’d shown Purvy the shirt while he was prepping him that morning, and Purvy had displayed no emotion, he says.
Why show the shirt to Purvy at all while he was on the stand, except to elicit sympathy from the jury? “It was an exhibit—it’s part of the evidence,” Locallo says, though he could have introduced it through a witness with less emotional attachment, such as one of the police officers who’d surveyed the scene of the crime.
Locallo allows that while he didn’t anticipate Purvy’s reaction, he was elated by it. He felt it certainly wasn’t going to hurt his case.
But as it turned out, it may have torpedoed it.
“Witness, 11, hysterical at murder trial,” read the headline in the next morning’s
Tribune
. Detective Frank Laverty saw the story.
Laverty was stunned that the case had actually gone to trial, he’d say later, having been assured by colleagues at Area 2 that the charges against Jones were being dropped because Purvy was an unsuitable witness. After reading the story, he called Cousins’s courtroom and asked to speak to anyone
connected with the Jones trial. The trial was in recess for lunch, but Haas and Schmiedel were still in the courtroom, and Haas got on the phone. Laverty identified himself and said he had information bearing on the case. Then the detective drove to 26th Street.
That afternoon, with the jury out of the courtroom, Laverty took the stand and told Judge Cousins about his interview with Purvy at the hospital, and about his interview of Lester Pigue. He also told the judge he’d written memos about these interviews.
Haas and Schmiedel asked Cousins to dismiss the case because the state had failed to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. Prosecutors Locallo and Varga told Cousins they knew nothing about the memos. But
the state is accountable for the withholding of such evidence regardless. Cousins recessed the trial and scheduled a hearing on the defense motion to throw out the charges. At that hearing, pursuant to a subpoena from Jones’s lawyers, Area 2 commander Milton Deas produced the case’s street file. In it were Laverty’s memos.
Commander Deas acknowledged to Cousins that it was standard procedure for detectives to withhold written information they deemed irrelevant. The danger of this practice was apparent from the Jones street file; the detectives had deemed irrelevant anything that might hurt the chances of convicting Jones.
Besides the Laverty memos, the street file contained a memo written shortly after the first interview with Purvy, in which Purvy had communicated that the offender was a gangbanger who was lighter-complected than he himself was. There were memos written while Purvy was still in a coma noting the warnings of doctors that even if Purvy did recover, he might not remember anything about the attack.
And there was a memo recounting a suggestion from Purvy’s father to detectives that the next-door neighbor might have been involved in the crime. Purvy Pointer Sr. had related this suspicion to detectives several days after the crime, while Purvy Junior was still lapsing in and out of consciousness. (Purvy Junior was “responding to parents” but “still not available for interview,” according to the memo.) The neighbor that Pointer said he suspected, a middle-aged man, was named George. It was just a few days later, when Purvy was able to be interviewed by police, that he whispered the name “George” when asked who the attacker was.
After hearing testimony from Commander Deas and Detectives Houtsma and Tosello regarding the reports that had been withheld, Judge Cousins declared a mistrial “with prejudice”—meaning Jones couldn’t be retried. The judge found no wrongdoing on the part of prosecutors Locallo and Varga. But he said the actions of the detectives had bordered on
“deliberate
misconduct,” and that it was his “firm belief” that the wrong man had been prosecuted.
JONES
’
S LAWYERS
then filed a class action suit in federal court seeking an end to the police department’s double-filing system. The suit charged that the system was aided by the willingness of Cook County prosecutors to look the other way.
It prompted the state’s attorney’s office to direct its prosecutors not only to call police headquarters when seeking police reports but to also call the relevant detective area and to ask the lead detectives on the case if they had additional records. The suit
also compelled the police department to instruct its detectives to turn over to prosecutors not only reports pointing to the guilt of the accused but also “any information … that may tend to show his possible innocence or aid in his defense.”
August Locallo says he’d bet that detectives “still cheat” by not turning in notes of exculpatory statements by witnesses, or by simply not writing such statements down.
Dan Locallo was among the defendants when a second suit was filed—the one in which Jones sought compensation for false arrest and imprisonment and malicious prosecution.
Prosecutors are generally immune from such suits, however, and a judge dismissed Locallo, Varga, and the state’s attorney’s office from the case. Locallo and Varga were subsequently designated “unsued co-conspirators.” Locallo says he wasn’t surprised by the filing of the civil suit. “That’s how they make their money,” he says of Jones’s lawyers.
The $801,000 awarded Jones in that suit included damages assessed against Area 2 commander Deas ($25,000), detectives Houtsma ($15,000) and Tosello ($5,000), and the crime lab’s Mary Ann Furlong ($10,000). After rendering their verdict,
the jurors fumed in the monthly
Chicago Lawyer
about the actions of the authorities who arrested and brought charges against Jones. “I was amazed at how lackadaisical the police and state’s attorneys were about everything,” said one juror. “They couldn’t admit they made a mistake.” Said another, “We wanted [the award] to be a warning to the police: Don’t do this again.” Jurors said they were particularly angered that the lawyers who defended the city in the lawsuit didn’t just argue that police had probable cause to arrest Jones; the city’s lawyers instead continued to maintain that Jones had indeed committed the attack on the Pointers. (The two lawyers for the city, like Locallo and Varga, are now Cook County judges.)
The appeals court panel that affirmed the jury’s decision in 1988 observed that Detectives Houtsma and Tosello had had a hunch that Jones
was guilty “and were not going to let a mere absence of evidence stand in their way.” There was little question that the detectives’ superiors “had known every false step taken by the subordinate officers, had approved every false step, and had done their part to make the scheme work,” the panel said. “We cannot say that the jury acted unreasonably in finding that all of the individual defendants were voluntary participants in a common venture to railroad George Jones.”
DURING JONES
’
S CIVIL SUIT
, the city’s lawyers implied that Laverty had his own agenda in the Pointer case—that he was bent on clearing Jones because Jones’s father was a police officer. They raised doubts about the veracity of his memos. Thomas Bennett, the detective who accompanied Laverty for the interview of Purvy after the panty hose discovery, testified that the information about “George” that they got from that interview—that George was a gangbanger who hung around the West Pullman school—was suggested to Purvy by Laverty with leading questions. Bennett also said Laverty reminded him once that Jones was “a policeman’s son” and that prosecutors were “going to try to give him the chair.” Detective David Edison, who was with Laverty for the interview of Lester Pigue, testified that Pigue never really described the weapon used in the Pointer crime—Laverty had suggested to Pigue the pipe’s length with his hands and had gotten an acquiescent assent from Pigue.
Jones’s lawyers contended that Detectives Bennett and Edison were merely closing ranks to aid colleagues who were being sued, and to repudiate the colleague who had broken the code of silence.
Laverty maintained he’d talked with Pigue because of the similarities between the rape and murder of Sheila Pointer and the sexual assault and murder of Sharon Hudson, to which Pigue had confessed. But as the city’s lawyers pointed out during the Jones suit, there were significant dissimilarities as well. Hudson had been killed on the street, not in her home, and Pigue had been an acquaintance of hers. The sexual assault of Hudson had consisted not of intercourse and ejaculation; Pigue had stuck a tree branch into her vagina, probably after she was dead. Hudson was twenty-one, Sheila Pointer twelve. Pigue was convicted of the Hudson murder and sexual assault in 1982 and sentenced to eighty years. In the 1970s he also had convictions for voluntary manslaughter and robbery and arrests for battery and contributing to the sexual delinquency of a child.
The panel of judges for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that dealt with the class action suit observed that Laverty had “upheld the highest ethical standards of the United States justice system” when he came forward during Jones’s murder trial. The panel suggested that Chicago police
administrators award him a commendation “for his adherence to the principles of honesty, decency, and justice.”
Laverty got a disciplinary investigation instead. He was, in fact, the only detective investigated by the department for his conduct in the Jones case. He was accused of testifying for the defense without first notifying his bosses. Laverty, who maintained he’d called Commander Deas before he testified, was ultimately cleared of that charge. But his testimony in the Jones case finished him as a detective. Assigned to a one-man car and given clerical duties at Area 2, he soon requested a transfer. Until he retired from the department in 1986, he was relegated to an administrative job at police headquarters. His responsibilities included standing in a washroom and observing police department applicants and officers as they gave urine samples.