Dashonn Maggette
Four months after he was wrongfully convicted of two serious crimes, the sentencing of Dashonn Maggette has yet to take place. Found guilty of beating a Chicago police officer, Maggette’s fate remains uncertain.
His public defender has filed a motion for a new trial after an allegedly biased judge who presided over the proceedings retired, amid a Crusader investigation into his background, and decision to keep a key document in the case sealed from the Crusader and the media.
But if Maggette is sent to jail, years after he had a scuffle with two Chicago police officers in Chatham, he can have his post-conviction case reviewed by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s Conviction Integrity Unit, an agency that reviews cases where defendants maintain their innocence.
If Maggette makes that decision, he may have a good argument and can have his conviction tossed out. His trial was called a “cover-up” by a jury foreman.
The judge who presided over the proceedings, Lawrence Flood, last month retired after the Crusader reported that he kept sealed a ballistic test report that might have cleared Maggette. That same document can also help expose Officers Patrick Forbes and Michael Hudson, who are accused of planting a gun on Maggette to frame him.
Despite the evidence and contradictory testimonies of two police officers, Maggette on June 30 was convicted of being an armed habitual criminal and of aggravated battery of police officers.
He has yet to be sentenced as prosecutors consider whether to try him again on three felony counts where jurors were deadlocked.
Today, Maggette has a new judge whom he hopes will grant him a new trial instead of sending him to jail.
But as a convicted man, Maggette is just one step away from being eligible to file a request to have his case reviewed by Cook County’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), the agency that reviews potential wrongful conviction cases. The only thing that stands in Maggette’s way from being eligible to file is that he has yet to be sentenced for his conviction.
All it takes is for the new judge, Nicholas Kantas, to deny Maggette a new trial and send him to prison. Questions remain, though, as to whether Maggette still qualifies to have his conviction reviewed by the CIU. That’s because Maggette is already behind bars after he was arrested in 2017 for the crime he was convicted of in June.
Created in 2012 by Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, the CIU vacated 237 convictions as of 2022, according to the State’s Attorney’s Office “2022 Year in Review.” Many of those vacated convictions involved cases from disgraced officers Jon Burge and Reynaldo Guevara. The CIU has been criticized for not reviewing cases from lesser-known Chicago officers accused of forcing false confessions and framing innocent people.
The CIU has an online application where individuals like Maggette, who believe they were wrongfully convicted, can file a request to have their claims of innocence reviewed. The 12-page form requires applicants to answer 28 questions about their claim and case. It asks applicants to provide documents and materials that support their claim of innocence.
The CIU form also explains who is eligible to have their cases reviewed. Applicants must meet all of the following standards:
• The defendant must be living. The CIU does not review convictions of a person who is deceased.
• The conviction must be for a felony offense, and it must have been obtained in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. The CIU does not review felony convictions from other states, federal court proceedings, or any Illinois county other than Cook County.
• The CIU will only review a criminal conviction where the defendant claims that he or she is actually innocent of the offense. “Actual innocence” means that the defendant bore no criminal responsibility at all for the offense.
• A claim of actual innocence must be supported by new evidence that was not known to the judge or jury at the time the defendant was convicted. The new evidence must provide a substantial basis to believe that the defendant is actually innocent, which generally means that the evidence exonerates the defendant from any criminal responsibility for the offense.
• A defendant may only seek review from the CIU after a final judgment of conviction has been entered and a sentence has been imposed. The CIU does not review cases if there is a pending direct appeal. The CIU may decline review during the pendency of post-conviction proceedings.
Maggette’s case meets most of the standards, except the last requirement that says a sentence must be imposed before the CIU reviews a claim of innocence.
Since he was arrested in 2017, Maggette has maintained his innocence as a defendant. For six years he remained behind bars at the Cook County Jail without a trial. When his trial finally got underway in June, Maggette’s public defender, Karin Talwar, struggled to defend her client. Judge Flood, a former Chicago police officer, overruled her numerous times, including the moment when she tried to cross examine Officers Forbes and Hudson after they gave statements that contradicted those they gave to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). Talwar requested a mistrial at least three times but was denied.
On the CIU’s application, the form asks applicants if prosecutors used certain pieces of evidence against them, including bullet/ballistic comparisons and DNA. In Maggette’s case, it was revealed during his trial that no fingerprints, Maggette’s or the officers’, were taken from the gun that Maggette allegedly used to shoot Hudson in the hand.
A ballistics test report reportedly ruled out that Maggette had a gun. That report has been sealed by Judge Flood since 2017. It cannot be viewed by the Crusader, other media or the public.
To this day, Maggette has not received a copy of that report and transcripts of the trial despite repeated requests.
After the trial, Oscar Morales, 20, who served as the jury foreman, called the proceedings a “cover-up” after he felt pressured to produce a verdict before the start of the Fourth of July weekend.
That confession fuels concerns that Maggette’s trial was ‘tainted’ and was a wrongful conviction case in the making. And questions remain why Foxx’s office allowed prosecutors to move forward in the case despite the red flags in their prosecution amid potential Brady violations.
There are also questions whether Maggette qualifies to have his case reviewed, despite him not receiving a jail sentence for his conviction.
Questions also remain whether Maggette already qualifies for review, because he has been behind bars since 2017 for the crime he was found guilty of committing.
Although the CIU application says a sentence must be imposed before the agency reviews a case, the application is not clear about individuals like Maggette, who were already in jail before they were convicted of a crime that put them behind bars in the first place.
The Crusader emailed Foxx’s office for comment on this story; no one responded by press time on Wednesday, November 1, for its print edition.
