In the long and tangled history of Cook County courts, there has never been a case quite like Gerald Reed’s.
Reed, 60 , slim and stern-faced, is set to stand trial Monday on charges of committing a gruesome double murder. In itself, that is not unusual.
But due to a complicated string of circumstances — possibly unprecedented and definitely perplexing — if he is convicted of the killings, he cannot go to prison for them.
The evidence against him is more than three decades old. The case unfolded in the notorious Jon Burge era. Reed, who has for years accused police of beating him into a false confession, was long ago found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Since then his conviction was reversed, then reinstated; then he was ultimately ordered to stand trial anew — without the use of the tainted confession.
And amid the muddle of court fights, Gov. J.B. Pritzker commuted Reed’s sentence, meaning he cannot serve one more moment of prison time on the case. After Reed was freed, he was picked up on new charges out of state — so at the end of the trial, he will go back behind bars, but not for the murder.
“From a practical standpoint, I think it’s kind of crazy to try someone when they can’t go to jail anymore,” said attorney Elliot Zinger, who has represented Reed for more than a decade. “… In some ways I’m happy about it, because I’m ready for a finding of not guilty.”
Robert Milan, the special prosecutor spearheading the retrial, declined to comment, saying Circuit Judge Steven Watkins, who is presiding over the trial, warned attorneys against speaking publicly about the case.
But during a 2021 court hearing, Milan was adamant that taking Reed back to trial is the right thing to do.
“We can’t send him back to prison, we know that,” he said. “But we’re not going to let him walk. We’re not going to pretend he didn’t kill these two people.”
A double slaying
Early one October morning in 1990, Pamela Powers was found under an Englewood viaduct, shot in the head and naked from the waist down.
In her ransacked apartment was the body of Willie Williams, who had also been fatally shot.
Investigators homed in on Reed and David Turner, whom authorities said were the last people seen with Powers before the shooting.
According to the team of special prosecutors retrying Reed, two witnesses told authorities that the night before the bodies were found, they saw Reed and Turner with a terrified Powers “in their control,” barefoot and without her coat. Reed’s attorneys dispute that characterization.
The bullets from the murder weapon matched a Gangster Disciples “community gun” that Turner was known to have previously handled, according to prosecutors; meanwhile, Reed’s attorneys recently have argued that is not enough to definitively link him to the killing.
“When you look into the record (of) what everyone says, there’s a lot of contradictions and a lot of confusion,” Zinger told the Tribune. “There’s nothing directly to place the guilt to either of them.”
In court and out of it, Reed’s attorneys have noted that prosecutors don’t have a definitive theory as to which man — Reed or Turner — fired the shots.
And in response, prosecutors have stressed that under the law, Reed and Turner can each be held accountable for the other’s actions — so, functionally, prosecutors don’t need to show any evidence about which man had the gun in his hand.
“I don’t have to prove who pulled the trigger in either one of these murders,” Milan said in court earlier this month.
Trying a case with 30-year-old evidence presents obvious challenges. Many witnesses are dead or otherwise unavailable; attorneys are expected to enter transcripts of their old testimony into the record instead.
One key witness who died years ago recanted that testimony privately, according to Reed’s attorneys, who want to put her children on the stand.
Judge Watkins, not a jury, will be tasked with determining whether Reed is guilty. The trial is expected to last about three days. Reed himself might testify, as could Turner, Zinger told the Tribune.
A broken rod
Up until now, most of Reed’s legal saga has not focused directly on his guilt or innocence.
Instead, proceedings have laser-focused on what happened before Reed was charged at all.
After his arrest, Reed was questioned by Detectives Michael Kill and Victor Breska, who were connected to a now-infamous former Chicago police commander, the late Jon Burge.
Burge, who died in 2018, is infamous for condoning the abuse and torture of suspects through the 1970s and 80s. Kill, also now deceased, has been accused in a litany of abuse cases.
The Burge era stained the city’s reputation and has cost taxpayers untold millions in settlements, legal fees and other compensation to victims.
Burge, who was fired from the Police Department in 1993, was convicted by a federal jury of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2010 over his denials in a lawsuit of ever witnessing torture or abusing suspects. He died after serving 4½ years in prison and home confinement.
In 1992, Reed testified about his interrogation during a pretrial hearing. He was seated and handcuffed to a wall when Kill and Breska entered and asked if he wanted to cooperate. Reed said no and asked for a lawyer, according to his testimony, at which point, he said, Kill left the room and Breska kicked the chair out from under him.
“I’m laying on the ground,” Reed said on the stand. “Officer Breska started kicking me” — over and over, Reed described, in the small of his back and in his right leg, where doctors had years before implanted a rod and screws after an old gunshot wound. The rod, medical records would later show, was broken.
Reed later signed a handwritten statement confessing to the murders. Judge Shelvin Singer, after the hearing at which Reed testified, was not persuaded to throw out that confession.
Later, observers described that court hearing as “very bizarre” and “confusing and disjointed.” It was at first not entirely clear what statement Reed’s attorneys were attempting to throw out — a verbal statement in which Reed arguably did not confess, or the handwritten confession with Reed’s signature on it.
When Reed was presented on the stand with that handwritten confession in 1992, he denied ever having signed it. Reed later said he lied about that because he was afraid of being labeled a snitch; in recent years he has testified he did sign it, but that it was a false confession he only signed out of fear of what might happen if he didn’t cooperate.
In light of that denial, Singer allowed prosecutors to show jurors the handwritten confession at Reed’s trial. He was convicted, but avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.
Turner also was found guilty. He made no confession to police and at least as of 2012 had not alleged he was tortured. His conviction is intact, and he is serving a life sentence, state records show.
Decades later, long after Burge’s misdeeds had become common knowledge, Reed’s case found new life before the state’s Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission.
The commission, empaneled to determine whether claims of police torture are credible enough to warrant review by a judge, heard Reed’s case in 2012.
In a closed discussion, one commissioner noted that Reed may not have been the most credible witness back in 1992 — but said it was indisputable that the rod in his leg had been broken, and that there was no other explanation for why that had happened, except for Reed’s testimony about being beaten by police.
In audio of the discussion, commissioners note that the medical history and records they had access to were too scant to determine with any certainty whether the rod might have been broken in some other way.
So they might as well allow Reed’s attorneys to argue the claims in court, one commissioner said.
“Let these lawyers get their experts and go back and look at his medical record. And if it was a preexisting condition, fine,” said the commissioner, who is not identified in the audio recording. “The judge can sort it out from there. But if we deny the claim … then this guy never really gets to make that case.”
Back to the courthouse
The Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission referred Reed’s case back to the Leighton Criminal Court Building, where it landed before Judge Thomas Gainer.
The extensive hearings before Gainer centered on how that rod in Reed’s leg could have been broken.
“The X-ray doesn’t lie. You look at the X-ray, you see what happened. It’s very simple. He was kicked. There was trauma. It’s on the X-ray,” Zinger said in closing arguments.
One doctor concluded that the bone had been broken twice — once from the gunshot wound and then from a “direct blow,” according to Reed’s attorneys.
Prosecutors noted that much of Reed’s 1990s-era jail medical records have been lost, and that medical experts said the rod could have broken on its own as the result of the bone’s natural healing process.
Just before Christmas 2018, Gainer handed Reed a major victory, throwing out Reed’s written confession and ordering a new trial altogether. Gainer retired shortly thereafter.
Special prosecutors, led by Milan, vowed to put Reed on trial again, saying they were confident of his guilt and in the strength of the evidence even without the confession. Reed’s attorneys spent months on an ill-fated long-shot effort to get Milan thrown off the case altogether.
Then, in February 2020, the case’s new judge threw the biggest curveball yet.
Judge Thomas Hennelly, in a surprise ruling, said that after reviewing the record of the 1992 hearing, it was clear that the judge’s ruling only applied to Reed’s verbal statement to police — not the written confession. Since that oral statement was never used against him at the original trial, his rights were never violated, and so he was not entitled to a new trial after all.
And Reed had no credibility, in part because he had admitted to perjuring himself in the 1992 hearing, Hennelly said. Echoing a fellow judge’s opinion that a different Burge accuser was like a scammer who claims to have ridden on a crashed bus to claim a payday, Hennelly addressed Reed directly.
“It is the court’s opinion, Mr. Reed, your ghost ride on the Jon Burge torture bus has come to a screeching halt,” Hennelly said, sending Reed back to prison to serve out the rest of his life sentence.
A brief spell of freedom
Then, with the stroke of a pen, Reed walked free.
Pritzker in spring 2021 commuted Reed’s sentence and released him after some three decades in custody.
But the order only affected Reed’s sentence. The conviction for double murder remained intact.
Not long afterward, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered that Reed’s conviction should in fact be thrown out — setting the stage, finally, for a retrial.
Meanwhile, upon release, Reed found himself in further legal trouble — a full-on “three-state crime spree,” as prosecutors described it. Authorities have accused him of wrongdoing in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
Reed is currently serving a 10-year sentence for robbing a woman in the parking lot of an Indiana Walmart in 2022. He has been brought in from the neighboring state’s prison to stand trial again in Cook County.
It goes to show that Reed is a danger to society, prosecutors have argued. Zinger recently told the Tribune it shows more about the lack of resources for former prisoners reentering the outside world.
Reed is looking forward to “his day in court, so to speak,” Zinger said.
“He wants to be vindicated, he wants to put some closure to the whole situation,” Zinger said.
But at the end of the high-profile murder trial, Reed will, no matter what, go back to prison — to serve out a sentence that will, no matter what, not be for a murder.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Zinger said.