By Fran Spielman
Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — Chicago taxpayers will pay $3.6 million to compensate a man who spent nine years in prison after allegedly being framed for an attempted murder he did not commit under a settlement advanced Monday by a City Council committee.
Robert Wilson was picked up by Chicago Police in 1997 one day after 24-year-old June Siler’s throat and face were slashed with a box cutter. Wilson was waiting at the South Side bus stop where the attack occurred. He confessed to attacking Siler but only after allegedly being held for 30 hours, physically abused, denied food, sleep and blood pressure medication and threatened with more violence if he did not confess.
“Robert Wilson was deeply wronged by the Chicago Police Department, and payment of $3.6 million reflects at least a tacit acknowledgment of that reality,” said Locke Bowman, his attorney.
“Mr. Wilson was coerced into confessing through psychological and physical means. A witness was manipulated,” Bowman said. “And when the true perpetrator came to the attention of police two weeks later, they ignored his admission that he was the one who had committed the crime.”
Siler initially told police that Wilson, now 56, looked too old to be her attacker. But officers allegedly coaxed her into identifying him.
Wilson was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison - largely on the strength of Siler’s testimony and his contested confession.
In the two weeks after Wilson’s arrest, another man committed five similar attacks in the area. But the trial judge agreed to a prosecution request to exclude that information at Wilson’s trial.
In 2006, a federal judge ordered a new trial on the grounds that Wilson’s attorneys should have been allowed to present evidence of the other similar attacks. Siler recanted. Prosecutors dropped the case.
Bowman said Wilson is unemployed and living in Chicago. “His life was destroyed,” Bowman said. “A decade was sucked out of the middle of it.”
Copyright 2012 Sun-Times Media, LLC
All Rights Reserved