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WORK TITLE: Justice Failed
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born circa 1954; married, 2013; wife’s name Terry.
EDUCATION:Associates Degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
RELIGION: Christian.WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Alton Logan is a writer and activist. He was born in 1954. In February 1982, when Logan was twenty-eight years old, he was sentenced to life in prison for a crime he did not commit.
On January 11, 1982, two African American men attempted an armed robbery of a McDonalds restaurant on the far south side of Chicago. During their heist, they shot and killed Lloyd Wickliffe and wounded Alvin Thompson, both of whom were security guards at the McDonalds. A month later Logan and another man, Edgar Hope, Jr., were arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder based on identifications by Alvin Thompson, the surviving guard. Although Hope had committed the crime, Logan was innocent.
Logan entered prison at age twenty-eight and spent the next twenty-six years of his life behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Following his release from prison, Logan was unable to find anyone that would hire him due to his gap in employment during his time in prison. He received a large sum of money as a reward from the legal cases involved in his false imprisonment, so he essentially retired once he got out of prison and lives off of his reimbursement.
Once out of prison, Logan reunited with a woman, Terry, he had met a year before entering prison. The two married in 2013. Logan and Terry live in Chicago.
Logan’s book, Justice Failed: How “Legal Ethics” Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years, describes his experience as well as the legal loopholes that caused him to remain in prison, despite there being proof that he was innocent, including another man’s confession. Logan wrote the book with the help of journalist Berl Falbaum.
Logan provides the framework of his case to explain the justification of the unjust prison sentence. The man that helped commit the murders at the Chicago McDonalds alongside Edgar Hope, Jr. was Andrew “Gino” Wilson. Wilson was already in custody at the time of the case for a separate charge of murdering two Chicago police officers. He confessed to also killing the McDonalds’ guard to the two public defenders who represented him, Dale Coventry and William Kunz. Despite admitting to the crime, Wilson refused to free his defenders from their obligations to him under the legal system’s code of ethics. This meant that, according to the law, the public defenders could not bring this information to light, despite the fact that keeping the secret resulted in an innocent man sitting in a prison cell. The two public defenders wrote an affidavit which testified to their knowledge about the case, hiding it away until Wilson’s death in 2007, which legally ended the obligation of secrecy.
Once Wilson’s guilty admission was revealed, a suit was initiated to secure Logan his rightful freedom. The process was complicated and lengthy, as Logan’s lawyers still had to rebut the original case as well as reverse decisions made in earlier attempts at appeal. As the case progressed, it became clear that the hidden confession was not the only botch up in the case. The police involved in the original investigation had found Wilson’s gun at the scene, and had never presented this evidence in court. Additionally, Wilson had actually confessed to committing the murders to a friend, and police chose to not include this information in the original case. Most significantly, Logan was a victim of the racist and corrupt police unit under former Chicago Police Department detective and commander Jon Burge. Burge was eventually accused of torturing more than 200 suspects between 1972 and 1991 and sentenced to four years in jail in 2010.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews wrote that the book is “a shocking tale of wrongful conviction and an argument for ‘a more responsive, sensitive, humane, and just legal system,'” while Christopher Zoukis in New York Journal of Books website described the book as “tragic but enlightening.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Justice Failed: How ‘Legal Ethics’ Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years.
Xpress Reviews, February 2, 2018, Lynne Maxwell, review of Justice Failed.
ONLINE
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 23, 2018), Christopher Zoukis, review of Justice Failed.
I Served 26 Years for Murder Even Though the Killer Confessed
One of the strangest, cruelest stories of wrongful conviction you’ll ever read.
By ALTON LOGAN and BERL FALBAUM
The article was published in collaboration with Vice.In 1983, Alton Logan was convicted of killing off-duty Cook County corrections officer Lloyd Wickliffe in a Chicago McDonald’s and sentenced to life in prison. What Logan didn’t know was that another man had confessed to the crime.
Life Inside
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Andrew Wilson confided his guilt to his attorneys, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, who didn’t come forward with the information for more than two decades. The lawyers said they were bound by a sacrosanct rule of legal conduct: attorney-client confidentiality. But according to the lawyers, Wilson agreed they could disclose the confession after his death. More than two decades later, that day came. In this excerpt adapted from his new book, Justice Failed: How “Legal Ethics” Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years, Logan and his co-author, journalist Berl Falbaum, describe Logan’s ordeal, how he put his life back together after a wrongful conviction, and his hope that no one else will suffer such an injustice. From the first day I stepped into my cell, anger took control of me. I was 28 years old. I was going behind bars for the rest of my life. No one in prison gave a damn if I was innocent or not.I talked back to guards and broke rules, not realizing I was only hurting myself. That meant I spent a lot of time in segregation—called “seg” by prisoners. Alone in a cell, I passed the time smoking, reading, and pacing. I fought the system for about five years. The message I wanted to send was, “You can’t break me.” I must admit, though, it ain’t easy sitting behind bars alone, especially when you know you’re innocent. Eventually, I realized that if I didn’t change my attitude, not only would I continue to do time in seg, but if my case went back to court, officials wouldn’t give me any sympathy.So I worked to turn my prison life around. I got a GED. I earned an associate of applied science certificate and a certificate for building maintenance. I took courses in carpentry, electrical installation, typing, and welding. I also spent a lot of time just trying to survive. Prison, after all, is a place where fights break out constantly, guards are beaten to within an inch of their lives, and prisoners are killed. I kept a homemade metal shank with me always, even tucking it under my pillow while I slept. Periodically, of course, my anger would return. Like when prison officials refused to let me attend my grandmother’s funeral.Or when my mother was dying of breast cancer and the authorities offered me a choice: Visit her—for all of 15 minutes—before she died, or attend her funeral. I was furious. My aunt urged me to see her one last time. She was right, of course.I was shackled like a dog when guards brought me to the hospital. My hands were cuffed, and the cuffs were attached to a chain around my waist. My legs were bound. That is how I saw my dying mother. She urged me to keep my hopes up, and, after 15 minutes, I returned to prison. She died two weeks later.Before she died, my mother told me over and over again that one day, truth would prevail. I shared her faith that someone, sooner or later, would come forward and say something to free me.Finally, in November 2007, I got that break. Andrew Wilson, who was serving a life sentence for the killing of two police officers, died in prison. Soon after, one of Wilson’s attorneys, Jamie Kunz, met with my lawyer, Harold Winston, to discuss my case. Kuntz told Winston about the signed affidavit containing Wilson’s confession. The document had been hidden away for years in a fireproof strong box at the home of another attorney of Wilson’s, Dale Coventry. At one point, he stored it under his own bed. When Winston called me with the news, I wasn’t initially all that confident the affidavit would help me. Yes, it sounded good. But I had been through too much. I was also upset from the jump. If these lawyers had evidence that I was innocent, how could they not have said anything? While I slept on a prison bunk for 26 years, Coventry was sleeping above a box that might have spared me years in hell. As word of the confession got out, my case started attracting local media interest. Then 60 Minutes aired a segment. The public was outraged. Many people demanded Kunz and Coventry’s disbarment, others recommended they be fined, and some suggested that they be imprisoned for 26 years. Years after my release, Kunz said he never expected such a hostile reaction.One April morning, I boarded a prison bus to the Cook County Jail, and from there was taken to the courtroom for a hearing on the new evidence in my case. If all went well, by the end of the day, I was going home.I was elated—and shed many tears—when the judge vacated my convictions and ordered a new trial. I was to be released on bond. Before entering the free world again, I changed into clothes my family brought me. But the pants, which belonged to my brother Tony, were about three sizes too big, and I didn’t have a belt. As we left court, my aunt held up the pants from the back so they didn’t fall around my ankles.I got into a car for the first time in 26 years and went to my aunt’s house, where we celebrated with about 50 people. I walked around all night with a bottle of champagne. Life outside was easy to take. But the final decision in my case had yet to be made. Five months later, I got the resolution I had sought for more than two decades. At a hearing in September 2008, the state dismissed the charges against me. “Your long personal nightmare is over,” said Cook County Circuit Court Judge James Schreier. “Hopefully, you will live a long life as a free man.”Finally, my wrong had been righted. Of course, I was still pissed, especially when I thought of the things police and prosecutors did to have me convicted. Six days after my arrest, police had matched a shell found at the McDonald’s to a shotgun confiscated while seeking Wilson for the murder of the two cops. But the police hid this from my lawyers. My life would have been very different if the cops and “officers of the court” had done their jobs honestly. Even after we got ballistics tests matching the gun to the shell casing, Cook County Chief Criminal Court Judge James Bailey refused to admit the evidence. But there was no use reliving the past. Under state law, I was able to petition the court for a certificate of innocence—an official recognition of my exoneration. Most importantly, I could receive compensation. Because compensation is capped at $199,150, I was eligible for an average of $7,659.61 per year for the time I was imprisoned. On April 17, 2009, I was formally declared innocent. A few months later, we filed a federal civil rights suit against the city of Chicago and several detectives, including the notorious former police commander Jon Burge, who I argued had conspired to build a false case against me irrespective of my guilt or innocence. (For decades, Burge used torture on dozens of mostly African-American suspects, usually to extract false confessions. Even though he had committed the crime for which he was convicted, Andrew Wilson sued him for torture, eventually winning a settlement from behind bars. Burge was fired and convicted of perjury for lying about torturing suspects.) I believed the government owed me something, even if it would never make up for the years I lost. Just before the December trial date—about 30 years after I was arrested—we settled out of court for $10.25 million. After paying lawyers’ fees, loans and other family obligations, I was left with about half. The city paid the money, but no one in power apologized. Some people have implied that I shouldn’t complain because I received a good settlement. But there is only one thing I wanted: the life that was taken from me. My mother was gone and so was my grandmother. I lost the best years of my life, years in which people build careers and raise families. I had neither. I had a 26-year hole in my work record. My resume included the skills I acquired in prison, as well as my certificate of innocence and newspaper stories about what happened to me. But no one would give me a job. I basically retired in my mid-fifties.My schedule was something like this: Get up in the morning, walk the streets, and visit old friends—the ones who were left. I was suffering from depression, and drinking a lot.Slowly, I worked my way out of it. I lived with my aunt for six months before moving in with a woman named Terry, who I met at a Labor Day family reunion about a year before going to prison. After I was convicted, we exchanged letters. She attended my court hearings and was very supportive, visiting me frequently. We married in 2013.One constant in my life has been my faith in God. I believed my prison sentence was His way of teaching me something. In 2010, I participated in a performance of *The Seven Last Words of Christ *by Franz Joseph Haydn at the University of Chicago. I was among nine people who read passages, including then-President Obama, who prerecorded his in Washington. I read about abandonment, including “by some in our justice system who talk righteously about civil liberties but then, knowingly, allow the most inhumane injustices to occur.”I had firsthand experience with that. Now I pray that the innocent who are imprisoned will hear the steel doors of their cells unlock and will walk out with their heads held high. Even if it takes 26 years.
ALTON LOGAN
Other Chicago Exonerations With Mistaken Identifications
Alton Logan
Two African American men shot and killed Lloyd Wickliffe and wounded Alvin Thompson on January 11, 1982, in an attempted armed robbery of a McDonald’s restaurant on the far south side of Chicago where the victims were security guards.
The next month, Alton Logan and Edgar Hope, Jr. were arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder based on identifications by the surviving guard — who was right about Hope, but wrong about Logan.
The week after Hope and Logan were charged, Andrew Wilson was arrested and charged with the unrelated murders of Chicago police officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. Hope then confided to his lawyer, Marc Miller, that he had committed the McDonald’s crime with Wilson — not Logan. When Miller told Wilson’s public defenders, Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz, what Hope had said, they confronted Wilson. He told them that, indeed, he and Hope had committed the McDonald’s crime.
As obvious as it was to Coventry and Kunz that Logan was innocent, they were ethically bound not to reveal, during Wilson’s lifetime, what he had told them in confidence. They did, however, prepare a notarized affidavit describing Wilson’s confession to them, which they kept in a locked box. There it would remain for a quarter of a century — until Wilson died of natural causes in prison on November 19, 2007. At that point Coventry and Kunz opened the box and broke their long silence.
Five months later Logan was released on bail – but prosecutors threatened to retry him. Finally charges against Logan were dismissed on September 4, 2008, more than 26 years after he was arrested for a murder he did not commit. He subsequently received a certificate of innocence. As a result, he was awarded $199,000 in state compensation.
In January 2013, the City of Chicago agreed to pay Logan $10.25 million to settle a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit.
— Center on Wrongful Convictions
News 01.15.13
Chicago to Pay Multimillion Dollar Settlement in Another Burge Case
Alton Logan, who spent 26 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, is expected to receive a $10.25 million settlement as compensation for the decades he spent behind bars. The settlement is only one in a series that the city has had to finance due to the misconduct of Police Commander Jon Burge and his underlings.
Burge was fired in 1993 for his role in the torture and beating of criminal suspects, a number of whom falsely confessed and were wrongfully convicted. In 2010, he was convicted of perjury, and he is currently serving a four and a half year sentence in federal prison in North Carolina. He was previously scheduled to appear as a witness at Logan’s trial via videoconference, which would have been the first time in 20 years that he would have testified in court. Logan’s lawsuit maintains that Burge and other officers covered up and even concealed evidence that could have exonerated him. The
Chicago Sun-Times
reports:
Jon Loevy, an attorney representing Logan, said the settlement is long overdue for a man who is still “struggling with the transition” nearly five years after his release from prison.
“Mr. Logan lost 26 years of his life. He went in in his 20’s. He came out in his 50’s. No amount of money can compensate a man for everything they lose under those circumstances,” he said.
“It’s hard to make a life when you’ve lost so much. He’s applied for hundreds of jobs. When they find out about this hole in his resume, it makes it very hard.”
Loevy added, “Mr. Logan’s case is an example of a sad truth: Sometimes, the wrong guy gets convicted of the crime. Fortunately in this instance, the truth came out.”
In 1982, Logan was falsely convicted of fatally shooting an off-duty Cook County corrections officer during a robbery attempt at a Chicago area McDonald’s restaurant. Despite a lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Logan’s conviction was vacated in 2008 after it was discovered that convicted cop killer Andrew Wilson had confessed to murdering the officer in the McDonald’s restaurant. Burge’s detectives even discovered the murder victim’s gun in Wilson’s possession when he was later arrested for gunning down two other Chicago police officers, but this information was never turned over to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.
The City Council Finance Committee is expected to approve Logan’s compensation at a meeting today.
Logan, Alton: JUSTICE FAILED
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Logan, Alton JUSTICE FAILED Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 10, 10 ISBN: 978-1-61902-992-7
A shocking tale of wrongful conviction and an argument for "a more responsive, sensitive, humane, and just
legal system."In 1983, Logan was sentenced to a life term, without parole, for a murder he did not commit.
With journalist Falbaum, he tells how the murderer's lawyers' commitment to protect their client's
confidentiality kept him in jail for 26 years. Two public defenders, Dale Coventry and William Kunz, were
in possession of evidence of Logan's innocence from the beginning. They represented Andrew "Gino"
Wilson, who was already in custody for murdering two Chicago police officers. Wilson confessed to them
that he had also killed the security guard that Logan was convicted of murdering. Wilson repeatedly refused
to free his defenders from their obligations to him under the legal system's code of ethics. The lawyers
crafted an affidavit testifying to their knowledge and locked it away until Wilson's death in 2007 freed them
from their obligation. Logan's tribulations involve much more than the concealment of the real murderer's
confession. He had been framed by a unit of the Chicago police under the leadership of Jon Burge, who was
later accused of torturing more than 200 suspects between 1972 and 1991. Dismissed from the police, Burge
was eventually convicted of perjury and sentenced in 2010 to four years in jail. Even with the revelation of
the affidavit, Logan's lawyers still had to rebut the original prosecutor's case and also reverse decisions
made in earlier attempts at appeal. The suit, which ultimately prevailed and secured Logan's freedom,
proved that "there was never any physical evidence tying me to the crime." Furthermore, exculpatory
evidence--a gun owned by Wilson--was known to police but not disclosed, and police failed to reveal that
Wilson told a friend about the murder. Evidence was made up, and witnesses whose evidence was helpful to
Logan were not called. A terrible personal case that brings general conditions into cruelly sharp focus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Logan, Alton: JUSTICE FAILED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572605/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89070fd4.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572605
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524516010162 2/2
Logan, Alton with Berl Falbaum. Justice
Failed: How "Legal Ethics" Kept Me in
Prison for 26 Years
Lynne Maxwell
Xpress Reviews.
(Feb. 2, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Logan, Alton with Berl Falbaum. Justice Failed: How "Legal Ethics" Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years.
Counterpoint. 2017. 160p. notes. index. ISBN 9781619029927. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781619029941. LAW
This work recounts the infamous case of former inmate Logan, who coauthored this powerful book with
former Detroit News journalist Falbaum. In simple, unadorned prose, Logan tells his story of the gravely
flawed justice system that imprisoned him, an innocent man, for nearly three decades. While, tragically, this
sort of miscarriage of justice is not unprecedented, Logan's case was fraught with wrongdoing on the part of
police and prosecutor. What makes his case unique, though, is that the actual shooter confessed to the crime
in a signed affidavit submitted to his lawyers, who withheld this confession until after the death of their
client. Meanwhile, Logan languished in prison. The book's subtitle raises the central issue as Logan attacks
the paradox inherent in the attorney-client confidentiality duty mandated by the Model Rules of
Professional Conduct, the ethical code of attorneys. Logan challenges the justice of a rule that requires
attorneys to maintain confidentiality of their clients' disclosures, even when such confidences harm innocent
individuals.
Verdict A powerful argument that will appeal to readers of Michael Morton's Getting Life: An Innocent
Man's 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace.--Lynne Maxwell, West Virginia Univ. Coll. of Law Lib.,
Morgantown
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Maxwell, Lynne. "Logan, Alton with Berl Falbaum. Justice Failed: How 'Legal Ethics' Kept Me in Prison
for 26 Years." Xpress Reviews, 2 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528197454/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2457ece.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528197454
Justice Failed: How “Legal Ethics” Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years
Image of Justice Failed: How “Legal Ethics” Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years
Author(s):
Alton Logan
Release Date:
October 10, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Counterpoint
Pages:
160
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Christopher Zoukis
“Alarming and timely, Justice Failed is a must-read for anyone hoping to better understand the reality of modern American criminal justice.”
Is it better that a guilty person goes free than an innocent person suffer wrongful conviction and imprisonment? According to many long dead jurists, the answer is a resounding "yes." In 1769, for instance, William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that "[i]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." And Judge Learned Hand described the "ghost of the innocent man convicted" as "an unreal dream."
Unfortunately, the innocent man convicted is far from unreal in the modern American criminal justice system. As of 2016, the National Registry of Exonerations listed over 1,900 wrongful convictions. Given the inordinately high bar for exoneration that number is likely far lower than the actual amount of men and women who have been wrongfully convicted in American courtrooms over the last several decades.
The plight of the incarcerated innocent is far from a dream, of course. The prison system is no picnic, and while an argument can be made that convicted criminals deserve to suffer in prison, no such claim can be made about someone imprisoned for a crime they did not commit. Many men and women have spent decades in prison despite having done nothing wrong.
Alton Logan is one of them. He spent 26 years locked up for a murder that he didn't commit. In and of itself, Logan's situation is not that abnormal in today's criminal justice system. Other than one simple detail, Logan would be just another one of many unfortunate souls who went to prison for a crime they didn't commit.
The detail? Two criminal defense attorneys knew for a fact that Logan was innocent from the very beginning. And they did nothing about it for 26 years.
In Justice Failed: How "Legal Ethics" Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years, Alton Logan and investigative reporter Berl Falbaum explore the unprecedented and horrific reason that Logan spent 26 years locked up.
Attorneys Dale E. Coventry and William Jamison Kunz were told by their client, Andrew Wilson, that he killed Logan's alleged victim. But because Wilson told the public defenders in confidence, canons of legal ethics strictly prohibited Coventry and Kunz from revealing their client's shocking declaration.
So the two sat idly by and watched as Logan was twice convicted of a crime that they knew he didn't commit. Logan narrowly avoided the death penalty at his first trial, but was twice sentenced to life imprisonment. For more than two decades, Logan sat in prison an innocent man.
Fortunately, the two lawyers were able to eventually help Logan prove his innocence. They convinced the real killer to allow them to record an affidavit attesting to what he had told them. Sadly, however, Wilson demanded that the affidavit not be released until after his death.
So the proof of Logan's innocence sat in a lockbox under attorney Coventry's bed for a quarter of a century. Ultimately, Wilson died in prison, and the affidavit was produced. Much legal wrangling ensued, and Logan was eventually freed. He was also declared innocent of the crime and received over $10 million in compensation.
But how could Coventry and Kunz have let an innocent man sit in prison for 26 years when the key to his freedom lay under the bed? Both attorneys defended the decision by citing the inviolability of the attorney/client privilege. Indeed, they argued, had this absolute privilege not existed, it was possible that Wilson would not have revealed his involvement in the murder at all.
Logan points out, however, that the lawyers' commitment to client confidentiality directly conflicted with their amoral and unethical decision to let someone rot in prison for 26 years. Nevertheless, he seems to have forgiven the attorneys for their decision. In Logan's mind, they were the only ones that actually followed the rules.
Alton Logan's story is tragic but enlightening. Justice Failed allows the reader to see just how easy it is for an innocent man to be convicted of a crime. Logan and Falbaum go through the details of the arrest, trial, conviction, retrial, and second conviction in detail, and the reader has the benefit of knowing that Logan was innocent the whole time. That perspective allows for a uniquely powerful insight into how we determine guilt and innocence, as well as the consequences of that determination.
Alarming and timely, Justice Failed is a must-read for anyone hoping to better understand the reality of modern American criminal justice.
Christopher Zoukis is a prison education advocate and the author of College for Convicts: The Case for Higher Education In American Prisons as well as several other titles. He has twice won the PEN American Center Prison writing award for drama and for fiction. He is currently incarcerated in a federal prison with his release expected in late 2018, by then having served 12 continuous years. Upon release he plans to attend law school and become a federal criminal defense attorney.