Vol 3. Issue 39
Oscar Nomination for Incident; Robert Johnson awaits judge’s decision
Photo: Courtesy of Mary Robinson
Why does it take so long to free an innocent person from prison? The case of Robert Johnson.
We first reported on Robert Johnson's wrongful conviction in 2020: he was 16 years old when Chicago Police took from his home on the South Side. Johnson was convicted of murder, home invasion and armed robbery without any physical evidence or eye witness testimony and sentenced to 80 years in prison. One of the officers was an affiliate of Commander Jon Burge, who led the torture of more than 100 Black men. Since that reporting in 2020, Johnson was granted a new evidentiary hearing and offered a deal to go home if he admitted guilt. Johnson refused, "No. I'm not pleading guilty for something I didn't do."
Next Wednesday, February 19, in courtroom 207, Judge Rosado will decide whether to release Robert Johnson, three decades after his arrest.
The case against Johnson reflects patterns documented in the Chicago Police Torture Archive, where officers under Burge’s command extracted false confessions, and the legal system upheld convictions built on coerced statements.
Read and listen to our latest story on the case of Robert Johnson at WBEZ, by Erisa Apantaku, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, and Alison Flowers, and listen to part two: a Curious City interview with Alison Flowers about what someone needs to overturn a wrongful conviction.
INCIDENT has been nominated for an Academy Award in the Short Documentary category.
Director Bill Morrison drew on our team's reporting to createINCIDENT, a short documentary primarily made up of body camera and surveillance footage. In 2019, in reporting forThe Interceptand in a collaboration withForensic Architecture, we released an investigation that contested the police narrative about the police killing of Harith Augustus, showing through video evidence that Augustus’s death was the result of aggressive policing rather than any criminal conduct on his part. Investigating this case mattered in part because this type of police killing came from a relatively routine encounter, one more likely to be repeated and not make headlines. The extended footage in the aftermath provides insight into how police narratives and neglect become operationalized.
“‘INCIDENT' is a unique instance of unprecedented public access to footage of a police shooting," said Morrison. "My hope is that viewers will take away a more informed view of how police surveillance footage can be used, withheld, and mischaracterized to exonerate officers. Police oversight begins with public awareness. Police accountability begins with acknowledgement of missteps and a willingness to address them. This film contributes to that process."
Watch an interview with Bill Morrison on the process of creatingINCIDENT.
Harith Augustus was a beloved barber in South Shore, who in the summer of 2018 was walking near his place of work on 71st street, when a group of officers apprehended him for having a concealed weapon. As he took out his wallet to show his Firearm Owner Identification Card, the officers escalated and Officer Dillan Halley shot him five times. His body laid in the street that afternoon as nearby residents gathered to demand answers. They were met with aggression from Chicago Police officers.
While several officers received suspensions for the incident, all disciplined officers remain members of the CPD. The officer who fired the fatal shots, Dillan Halley, received a two-day suspension. Davina Ward, a lieutenant who received a 30-day suspension for allowing Halley and a fellow officer to confer about their recollections of the shooting in the aftermath, has been promoted to district commander.
In 2023, the Chicago Police Department won the wrongful death lawsuit brought by Harith Augustus' family against the officers.
We are humbled by the recognition, and we are focused on the current reality of the city's recent rollback on transparency of bodycam footage that would make an investigation like this impossible. In December 2023, the City of Chicago reached a new collective bargaining agreement with the Fraternal Order of the Police. A provision of the contract, ratified by the Chicago City Council, states that body worn cameras are not to be used to record post-incident conversations between officers and that any such recordings that are created must be deleted. Had this law been in effect in 2018, none of the material that comprises the film INCIDENT would have been available to the public or to oversight agencies.
“Tragically, racial profiling by police remains prevalent. Again and again, in incident after incident, we have seen police produce through their own actions the "split second" in which they decide to use lethal force against people of color. There could not be a more timely moment to address this issue,” said Jamie Kalven, who co-produced the film in close collaboration with Morrison.
On Wednesday January 22, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the caseBarnes v. Felix, which presents the issue of whether courts should apply the "moment of the threat" doctrine when evaluating an excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment or should assess the "totality of the circumstances.”
Watch the film,INCIDENT, atThe New Yorker, and read recent reviews inThe Guardian and The New York Times.
Photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune
Jamie Kalven's recent Op-Ed for the Chicago Tribune: Is it time for the University of Chicago to abandon cherished neutrality and join the fight?
Jamie Kalven has a new op-ed about University of Chicago's free speech ethos and the Kalven Report, the document that sets forth the policy — the “presumption” — that universities as institutions should not take positions on the issues of the day. For the Chicago Tribune, he asks: "Is it time for the University of Chicago to abandon cherished neutrality and join the fight?"
"Perhaps it is simply the nature of bureaucracies, but the [Kalven] report almost immediately hardened into institutional dogma, invoked again and again, in the view of its critics, not to ensure space for vigorous discussion about possible exceptions that would overcome the presumption against collective action but to shut such discussion down.
The upshot is that a significant number of students and faculty have come to regard it as a tool of censorship rather than a guarantor of free speech."
Read in full on our website, and RSVP to the in-person conversation with Jamie on February 18 at the University of Chicago: “The Unfinished Business of the Kalven Report.”
Book discussion series begins
Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future
On February 10, we gathered in person and virtually for our first book club discussion about Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future. The conversation focused on the ways we are alienated from the data extracted about us and how data collection is an approximation of reality and often misguided and harmful in its attempts to reflect and affect reality.
You’re welcome to join the next one: on February 24 at 6-7:30 CST, we will be discussing chapters 3, 4, & 5. Save the date and register here to attend one or more of the discussions in the series.
Chicago Police Torture Archive
The Chicago Police Torture Archive (CPTA) documents the decades-long violence committed by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and his officers, who tortured more than 100 Black people into false confessions between the 1970s and 1990s. The archive preserves case files from the People’s Law Office, which represented many survivors, and serves as a public record of how the legal system enabled these abuses.
Among the wrongful convictions linked to Burge’s circle is the case of Robert Johnson. In 1994, Johnson was just 16 years old when he was taken from his home by Chicago police and convicted of murder, home invasion, and armed robbery—despite no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony. One of the officers involved in his case was affiliated with Burge’s team. Johnson remains in prison today, still fighting for his freedom.
The legal and institutional failures that upheld Burge’s torture ring continue to shape the criminal justice system. Read our 2020 investigation into Johnson’s case here, and follow his ongoing fight for exoneration in the latest reporting from WBEZ.
