Lakisha Jackson used to visit her brother in Cook County Jail, holding her infant son up to the glass so he could see his uncle.
Now, 23 years later, her son, an adult, sat beside her as a Cook County judge on Monday ordered Kevin Jackson, 43, released from prison while his appeal of his murder conviction remains pending.
Jackson has long maintained that he is innocent of shooting and killing 54-year-old Ernest Jenkins and injuring another person at a Southwest Side gas station on May 6, 2001. His release has been hard fought, as most recently a Cook County judge denied his motion for a new trial, even as the state’s attorney’s office did not contest the request amid a report from special prosecutors that was critical of the police investigation and raised doubts about Jackson’s guilt.
The fight, though, is not over. An Illinois appeals court reviewing his case ordered him released while the appeal is ongoing. In response, Cook County Judge Angela Petrone ordered Jackson released on electronic monitoring, noting the unusual circumstance of having to determine conditions for release for someone who is still convicted of murder.
“I do agree … that this is a unique circumstance,” Petrone said. “He’s still convicted of first-degree murder and society needs to be protected.”
Still, even with the fight continuing, Lakisha Jackson spoke excitedly of her first meal with her brother in more than two decades. She’s thinking steak, rice and gravy.
“I was mad, angry, bitter, I wanted to crash out, but I didn’t do it because my brother made me stay strong behind the walls,” she said.
Jackson’s case has taken an unusual path through the criminal justice system. After years of denied appeals, his attorneys pled their case to the state’s attorney’s office, asking that their unit that reviews potential wrongful convictions take a look at the case. After the unit denied his appeal, his attorneys learned that an assistant state’s attorney that worked closely with the unit was married to a detective who had been accused of misconduct while investigating Jackson’s case.
In response, the state’s attorney’s office appointed special prosecutors Thomas Geraghty and Robert Owen to do an independent review of the case. Their lengthly report found that the “case presents a microcosm of the many ways in which a police investigation into a serious violent crime can fail.”
The detectives who investigated Jackson’s case, Brian Forberg and John Foster, have generated scrutiny in the past year with more than a dozen defendants accusing them of coercing and manipulating witnesses in order to close cases. Forberg was married to the assistant state’s attorney who worked with the Conviction Integrity Unit (now called the Conviction Review Unit).
The report points out that the state’s case against Jackson in its entirety was based on statements that witnesses gave to detectives, only to then retract at trial, alleging a number of coercive tactics. One such witness was a pregnant woman who said the detectives threatened that she’d give birth to her child in jail and lose custody if she didn’t name their suspect, the report said.
It also said that detectives ignored evidence of a different perpetrator, and that the Conviction Integrity Unit did not examine the case with “the same vigor” after former Assistant State’s Attorney Nancy Adduci took over as head of the unit.
After Petrone denied Jackson’s motion for a new trial, his attorneys appealed, and the justices ruled that Jackson should be released because the appeal “raises a substantial question of law or fact likely to result in a reversal or order for a new trial.” They sent the case back to Petrone to decide on conditions for release.
During a hearing Monday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Petrone said she struggled to determine what types of conditions for release the appeals court intended when sending the case back to her.
“I wish they were spelled out a little more clearly,” she said, noting that if the defense appeals her order for electronic monitoring, she may get more clarity.
In ordering Jackson’s release, per the higher court, Petrone delivered a lengthy summary of the case history, noting that multiple other courts have denied his requests for a new trial.
“In December of 2023, this case was put on the court call. The court file had not been brought to court room,” Petrone said. “Defense attorneys and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office presented to the court an agreed order to vacate … and asked that I simply sign it.”