Locke Bowman has seen people convicted on some pretty weak evidence. He helped win the freedom of Ronald Jones, one of Illinois’ 13 exonerated death row inmates, who was convicted on the strength of a dubious confession he always insisted police beat out of him. Two years ago Bowman helped free an inmate who’d been convicted of a rape that DNA evidence proved he couldn’t have committed.
It’s an irony that’s seemed all the more painful to Curtis in recent weeks. Every judicial avenue has been exhausted, and executive clemency is now his only hope of reversing his sentence. Bowman filed a petition on Curtis’s behalf and presented it to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in early October, a week before the emotional, highly controversial, and widely covered clemency hearings for death row inmates.
Though police interviewed more than a dozen neighbors, Robert’s sister Claudette was the only person who claimed to have seen her brother’s killer. She told police that when she heard gunshots she looked out her second-floor bedroom window and saw a black man running south down the gangway of the building across from her residence. She described him as five-foot-eight to six feet, thin of build, and dark skinned, with black curly hair. Claudette told police he was wearing a gray hat, blue jeans, dark slacks, and white gym shoes.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Yet there’s no record that police ever interviewed Carr about Robert Springs’s murder. So far as Bowman knows, Carr wasn’t included in any of the lineups shown to Claudette Springs, and he was never mentioned as a suspect in any subsequent police reports. Two days after Robert Springs was shot, Joseph Curtis became the prime suspect in his shooting.
One was Joseph Curtis.
“Lots of people tell me that they haven’t done things, and I can intuit sometimes from the context and from the train of the conversation–I’m skeptical. In [Curtis’s] case, the more I talk to him about it and the more I listen to him talk about it, the more convinced I become that there’s been a mistake here.
