This could be the story of two wrongful convictions. This could be the story of how James Allen was railroaded by a Chicago police detective and Cook County prosecutors who didn’t think he deserved to be free. But before he has the chance to prove that he’s innocent of two murders, Allen needs one thing: for Dorothy Brown, the clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, to do her job.
Allen’s attorney, Steven Becker, has worked for the Office of the State Appellate Defender (which represents defendants who can’t afford private attorneys in appeals) for close to a decade, and has represented many clients seeking to overturn convictions. “The majority of postconvictions filed do not advance to the second stage,” he says.
Brown’s failure to provide warehoused records in a timely manner has been an ongoing problem for years. In 2013, after being publicly chastised by the appellate defender’s office, Brown promised sweeping reforms in her management practices. She also touted major improvements in record storage and retrieval in 2014, when the county opened a $24 million, state-of-the-art warehouse in Cicero, largely for her office’s use. However, as Allen’s case indicates, timely record retrieval continues to be a challenge for the clerk of the circuit court. Since the passage of a new law in 2017 that requires Brown to provide records for appeals electronically, there’ve also been significant delays in scanning and transmitting warehoused files. Allen’s attorneys haven’t been able to get digital records to proceed with his appeal of a rejected postconviction motion in the Gibson case for more than a year. The appellate defender’s office says more than 600 of its cases are currently held up for the same reason.
On a January night in 1969, a 19-year-old Allen sat in the backseat of a stolen car in front of the Bell & Howell camera manufacturing plant in Lincolnwood. Two of his friends—Larry Gibson and Tyrone Oby—sat in the front. Having rehearsed what they would do for three weeks in a row, they patiently waited for the arrival of an armored truck with $60,000 of the company’s payroll that they planned to rob. Allen says their plan was to distribute most of the money to charity groups around the Washington Park neighborhood and keep about two grand each for themselves. They’d brought ski masks, duct tape, handcuffs, and guns—a couple of pistols and an army AR-15 stolen from a railyard—though they didn’t think they’d need to use them. Allen sat with the rifle in his lap. A half hour passed after the truck’s scheduled delivery time, and the three began to feel nervous; they decided to abandon the robbery. Just as they started to drive away, Chicago police blocked their exit and they were blinded by a floodlight from the roof of the plant. Allen fired his rifle once, at the floodlight, and then, he says, “all hell broke loose.”
Allegedly, Gibson was working for a big-time drug dealer named Charles Ashley, and Ashley put out a hit on him in June 1984 because he suspected Gibson of being a police informant. CPD detective Michael Pochordo, who is now deceased, and prosecutors cited testimony from a confidential informant that Allen was the driver of a car in which Gibson was shot four times in the back of the head and then dumped on an exit ramp of the Chicago Skyway. Another man, Henry Griffin, was convicted of being the shooter and put on death row. No physical evidence was ever presented to tie Allen to the murder. Nevertheless, Allen was convicted by a jury and received a life sentence.
Pochordo and prosecutors relied on statements from the same confidential informant to bring charges against Allen for both the Gibson and Ciralski murders. That informant was Darryl Moore—an ex-convict and admitted hit man whose credibility was impeached as early as 1986, when he recanted his statements about Stokes contracting the Ciralski murder. He told the Tribune in an interview at the time that he used payments he received from the state’s attorney’s office in exchange for his statements to run a drug operation and that he had “no hesitation” about framing people “for the money.” Under Daley, the state’s attorney’s office paid Moore tens of thousands of dollars for information in heater cases, the Tribune and Chicago Lawyer reported. Court filings by the state’s attorney’s office in the early 2000s confirmed payments of some $66,000. Moore was also able to get reduced sentences for various crimes in exchange for providing testimony.
