In February 1999, Thomas Epach Jr., a top prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, took on the daunting task of overseeing evidence presented to a grand jury that was reinvestigating the high-profile murder case against death row inmate Anthony Porter. Nearly 15 years later, he’d remain uncertain whether the right man ended up behind bars.

Soon after, Epach, the office’s expert on the Porter case, found himself in the rather astonishing position of reinvestigating the case against an inmate who, days earlier, had been facing imminent execution.

Instead, a second grand jury drawn from a new pool of jurors was impaneled the following month. Those grand jurors were given a fraction of the evidence the first grand jury considered, presented not over weeks but in a single afternoon. They heard none of the witnesses who bolstered the 17-year-old case against Porter, none of the Northwestern students or Protess, and none of the testimony that stirred skepticism in the first grand jurors and revealed that the Innocence Project had overlooked critical evidence against Porter.

“Well, the answer is, [the state’s attorney’s office] went to a separate grand jury to secure the indictment.”

After reviewing testimony from the first and second grand juries, Marquis says: “That first grand jury made all the sense in the world: ‘What the heck happened here?’ ‘Did we get the right guy or did we not get the right guy?’ That makes good sense to do that.

“As you sit here today, can you tell this grand jury who it was that fired the shots?” Gainer asked.

“I know what I’ve been doing for the past month, and that has been investigating Anthony Porter’s innocence,” Rhodes-Pitts replied.

“Or guilt,” the grand juror said. “He might be guilty?”

The following attorneys and investigators were contacted multiple times and either failed to respond or declined to comment: former Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine, current Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, former Innocence Project director David Protess, and Alstory Simon’s former defense attorney, Jack Rimland. Reached by phone, investigator Paul Ciolino, who worked on the Innocence Project’s probe of Simon, would only say, “Basically, I’m just done with Simon and Porter, and I don’t know what I could add to it. I’m done with it, man. You guys got my statement.”