A Cook County prosecutor has filed a motion to reconsider a ruling by a judge who gave Roosevelt Myles his certificate of innocence last month.
In her ruling on July 29, Judge Carol Howard said Myles met the standard to obtain his certificate of innocence after hearing arguments from Todd Dombrowski, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office prosecutor who fought the exonerated man’s case for years.
Dombrowski had 30 days to appeal the decision. On Monday, August 26, the last day before the deadline to appeal was set to expire, Dombrowski filed a motion to reconsider.
A motion to reconsider allows a party to bring newly discovered evidence previously unavailable at the hearing, changes in the law, or errors in a trial court’s decision-making.
In his motion, Dombrowski argued that Howard did not properly “follow the clear language” of the certificate of innocence statute in assessing whether Myles met his burden of demonstrating his innocence.
“As the appellate court’s decisions have stated, to obtain a [certificate of innocence], a petitioner must prove inter alia, is innocent of all offenses with which he was charged,” Dombrowski says in his motion. “And, in instant matter, Petitioner did not prove-or even allege-that he was innocent of all the offenses charged within his indictment.”
In 1996, Myles was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery after prosecutors said he shot and killed 16-year-old Shaharan “Tony” Brandon while he and 15-year-old Octavia Morris were walking out of a house on Chicago’s West Side at 2:45 a.m. on November 16, 1992. Myles, who was near the area at the time of the murder, was stopped, questioned and eventually arrested and charged with Brandon’s murder.
There were no fingerprints or DNA evidence that linked Myles to the crime. Myles didn’t even fit the description of the killer. And Myles had an alibi, Michael Hooker, who wasn’t allowed to testify at the trial in 1996.
The state relied on Morris’ false testimony to convict Myles. She later recanted her testimony in two affidavits where she said disgraced detective Anthony Wojcik and five police officers kept visiting her home to pressure her into lying that Myles committed the murder.
In 2022, Myles was exonerated after spending 28 years in prison. He was released in 2021,
To clear his criminal record and file a claim for compensation with the Illinois Court of Claims, Myles had to obtain his certificate of innocence by filing a petition in criminal court.
However, when Myles filed a petition for his certificate of innocence, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office filed papers in March asking the court to deny Myles the crucial document he needed to move on with his life.
During his certificate of innocence hearing before Judge Howard, Dombrowski tried to bring up police reports that involved Sandra Burch, a sex worker and witness who initially said Myles did not commit the murder. Burch told police that Myles didn’t look like the killer but that she had changed her story in subsequent police reports.
Burch was not at Myles’ hearing on Monday. She died before Myles was convicted in 1996.
At the end of the three-hour hearing, Howard told Dombrowski, “There’s no physical evidence that links Mr. Myles to the shooting. It’s clear that Mr. Myles has established his innocence.”
Dombrowski, during the hearing, also tried to bring up Burch and Morris to link Myles to the murder. Dombrowski also tried to bring up another witness, Deborah Lenoir, who testified during Myles’ trial in 1996 that she was on her way to a liquor store when she saw Myles in the area.
But Judge Howard said Lenoir “never implicated Mr. Myles as being involved in the shooting.”
At one point during the hearing, Dombrowski blamed Myles for causing his own conviction and incarceration. That infuriated Bonjean, who was aggressive throughout the hearing as she objected to many allegedly false statements Dombroski made.
