I suspect the racist cops will say that even if DNA proved he didn't commit this crime he must be guilty of something and deserved what he got, after all he is Black!
Exonerated, freed and facing a new life
By Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune reporter
November 25, 2011
On that first night, he could hardly sleep. He sat on the couch in his parents' front room, gazing at the walls and the ceiling, the calm of the night broken only by an occasional cough and the pounding of his heart. He had thought of this moment often, imagined how it would feel and what he would do, how he would stop time and savor every minute of it. But when the moment finally arrived, he was overwhelmed by it.
For nearly two decades, Robert Taylor had been imprisoned for a rape and murder he had insisted he did not commit. Then one day earlier this month, after DNA tests prompted Cook County prosecutors to ask a judge to throw out his conviction, officials handed him $13 for bus fare and he walked out of prison into a soft rain and the powerful embrace of his father.
He was free.
Now, weeks later, he has seen much, and much of it for the first time. The lake on a cold, gray day. The city's skyline. The small but neat house where his parents live and where he celebrated his long-awaited homecoming with pizza. He has done much, too. Hailed a taxi for the first time. Made a call on a cellphone. Sat in a loud Mexican restaurant and sipped on Coronas. Had a date, although because he does not have a driver's license, he had to be dropped off and picked up.
He got a state identification card. No longer was he an inmate number; once again, he had a name.
"Beautiful," he has said about almost everything since his release.
The first blush of freedom has been accompanied by an almost equal measure of struggle, however, the same kind experienced by the four men who were cleared with him and by others who have been exonerated after long stints in prison. He feels guilty he was not around to help his parents, who barely make ends meet. He worries about how he will navigate a world that he scarcely recognizes; consequently, he stays close to his parents' home in Harvey, calling the world outside "enemy territory" and his family a "security blanket."
Although he hides his emotions behind an expressionless but handsome face, he seethes: over his arrest shortly after turning 15 and the treatment he received from police; over his conviction and long prison sentence; over the years he spent behind bars essentially doing nothing. He wishes the police and prosecutors who handled his case, and who he believes knew he was innocent, could experience even a fraction of what he went through in prison.
"I'd like to see how they handle it," he said. "I can't believe people do what they did to me."
Behind the walls
For the last 11 years, Taylor could not see anything beyond the 33-foot-high concrete walls that surround the maximum-security Stateville Correctional Center unless he was standing in the yard and looking straight up at the sky. Not the fields outside the prison. Not the nearby Des Plaines River. He could only imagine the south suburban houses and apartments where his family lived, could only picture walking around the distant Chicago downtown he had never visited.
Taylor and four other teenagers were convicted of the rape and murder of Cateresa Matthews, a 14-year-old girl who disappeared from her grandmother's Dixmoor home in 1991. Her body was found three weeks later in a field near Interstate 57. She had been shot in the mouth.
Taylor, feeling pressured by police, and two other teens confessed. Primitive DNA testing before trial excluded all five as the source of semen found in the victim's body, but prosecutors relied on the confessions and two teens who pleaded guilty. Taylor, sentenced to 80 years, could not understand how anyone could ignore the DNA or believe he could commit such a crime.
He refused to cry. To even show emotion. It was, he said, the only way to survive. He and another inmate were held in a cell measuring 10 feet 7 inches by 6 feet 7 inches, a bunk bed on one side and a desk and stool on the other, metal bars on one end and a sliver of a window along the top of the other end that let in the only natural light, a narrow slant of sunshine that taunted him but also gave him hope. He dreamed often of freedom, lying on his bunk, sleep elusive, the noise of prisoners yelling and screaming echoing through the metal galleries.
He got used to the noise, so much that the quiet of home was initially unsettling. Now he is getting used to the silence. Though he had a TV in his cell, he did not watch it much. Instead, he listened to cassette tapes of rap music on an old Walkman, the headphones shutting out a world he wanted desperately to escape. He could not listen to slower R&B because he found it made him think of what he could not have behind bars.
"It makes you think of girlfriends and stuff," he said. "That kind of stuff is too hard to think about in prison."
In prison, Taylor made few friends, trusted no one and stayed out of trouble. Like many inmates, he studied his case, learned carpentry and lifted weights. He became resourceful in ways he had not imagined. He filled plastic bags with water to use as dumbbell weights. He put paper clips into the end of an extension cord to heat the rice and noodles he bought at commissary and preferred to prison food.
Indeed, he ate only once or twice a day, mostly in his cell, going to the mess hall only to get out and take a walk.
He tried not to feel anything. But he always believed that someday someone would realize he had been wrongly convicted.
"I always said I'm going to be on the other side of that wall someday," he said.
And then he was.
On the outside
"You've got to be careful," Joshua Tepfer, a lawyer at Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions and one of Taylor's attorneys, said to him one afternoon as they drove downtown. "I know there are a lot of good-hearted women, but some will just see dollars."
Tepfer, who had picked up Taylor at home, had been considering how to have this conversation. He had been Taylor's lawyer for two years and, while he had admired Taylor's perseverance in trying to prove his innocence, he also had come to like his client.
And in fact Taylor stands to receive a substantial sum of money, first from a wrongful-conviction petition to the state Court of Claims, then potentially more from a lawsuit. Women already were paying attention to him, and he said he wanted "to get reacquainted with the female of the species." At a Wal-Mart, women recognized him from TV coverage of his release and stopped shopping to stare at him.
"I want to make sure he has his eyes open about everything. I want him to know he can rely on me, that my representation is not over just because the criminal case is now over," said Tepfer, who will not handle any civil suits. "There are so many stories of innocent people who get out and don't handle it well."
Indeed, exonerated prisoners have had varying levels of success after their release. In one of the worst cases, Aaron Patterson, a death row inmate pardoned and set free by former Gov. George Ryan in 2003, was convicted of federal gun and drug charges and returned to prison. Others have struggled with drugs, women and family members and friends asking for money. Some have found peace and embarked on new chapters in their life.
Taylor's chances are no doubt improved by a stable family; his parents are high school sweethearts who have been married 35 years. They were frequent visitors while he was in prison, bolstering his spirits while he tried to keep up theirs. They often put off buying medicine and other essentials to send him money, something he has not forgotten and is determined to repay.
Now 34, Taylor is short but has a broad, muscular body and arms covered with crude prison tattoos he wants to have removed. He has a bright dome of a head, mournful eyes and a finely etched fringe of beard and mustache that surround a mouth that looks like it could break into a smile at any time but rarely does.
Since he was set free, he has mostly stayed home, playing video games with his father and watching his toddler nieces and nephews scamper around the house. He is at once a stranger and someone familiar. His mother hugs him frequently; sometimes, she said, she "can't believe he's really home after all these years." He feels he should move out. After all, he is a grown man, and he needs his privacy. He also wants to respect his parents.
He wants to figure out what to do with his life and seems in a hurry to do so, though people have urged him to take his time. But he lost so much time, he does not want to lose more. His initial attempts to find a job, at retailers such as Foot Locker and Wal-Mart, have been unsuccessful. And he feels an urgency to get a job; one evening, watching a movie with his mother, the phone rang and, without saying a word, he hung up.
"Bill collector," he said.
He wants to shed his anger, but he knows it will not be easy. That anger, he said, got him through prison.
A smile at last
He was walking back into a courthouse, and he felt uneasy. Last week, four other men who had gone to prison as teens were at the Cook County Criminal Courts building hoping a judge would throw out their convictions. Taylor had been out for only 13 days, but he was persuaded to come to court to show support, in part because the defendants had the same attorneys, in part because the case was strikingly similar to the one that sent Taylor and his co-defendants to prison.
Two of his co-defendants, brothers James Harden and Jonathan Barr, who had been released after Taylor, also were there.
"It feels funny," Taylor said.
Outside, he was part of a scrum, surrounded by reporters and TV cameras. Exonerations make unlikely media stars out of individuals unprepared for the role. Suddenly, they are besieged, and people pay attention to them to a degree they never did while they were in prison. Taylor and his co-defendants were largely ignored for years. When DNA testing this year matched a convicted rapist, suddenly there was interest.
Those tests raised the hopes of Taylor's lawyers. Taylor got his hopes up, too. He believed he would be released quickly. When Assistant State's Attorney Mark Ertler told a judge this spring the DNA match was meaningless and prosecutors would continue to oppose the release of Taylor and the others, they were crushed. In a holding cell outside the courtroom, Barr and Harden cried, according to lawyers.
Taylor showed no emotion. He was bewildered, angry and disappointed the prosecutor still thought he was guilty, but Taylor refused to show it.
"We didn't do a great job of expectation management," said Jennifer Blagg, another of Taylor's attorneys. "He had been waiting, waiting, thinking he was going to get out any day, and he was just so disappointed. I think he shut down more."
When several months later prosecutors finally abandoned the case and agreed to join a defense request to throw out the convictions, Barr and Harden were jubilant. Again, they cried. Taylor told Blagg that he watched as everyone grew excited by the decision, which was a surprise to the lawyers and defendants, but he did not feel happy. He shook his head. He could not feel happy. As much as he searched inside himself for it, it just was not there.
But when he watched the other case from the gallery, watched as a judge vacated the convictions of the four men, he was happy for them. He walked out of the courtroom, and the smile that for two weeks had been so elusive spread across his face.
Chest pounding
On a blustery afternoon, Tepfer and Taylor were at the Center on Wrongful Convictions for several hours of meetings intended to help Taylor begin the process of reclaiming his life. In an eighth-floor conference room, Lake Michigan's choppy expanse visible through tall windows behind him, Taylor sat with hands clasped in front of him, listening closely, saying little and eyeing everyone with sidelong glances.
A center worker told him that while he was in prison, people had power over him, but, "Now you have the power." She said he would get help learning to use a cellphone, computer and the other things he would have learned to use as a child if he had not been sent to prison.
Then Taylor met Johnny Lee Savory, who went to prison at age 14 for a double murder he insisted he did not commit. He was paroled in 2006 after 30 years. Savory offered to take Taylor and his father, who accompanied his son downtown, to get a state ID card. Again Taylor was overwhelmed, his chest pounding as he tried to take in so much information, so many suddenly new choices. He said he felt like he was going to have a heart attack.
Savory tried to settle him.
Outside, Taylor craned his head and marveled at the skyline. He yelled "taxi," then let out a small giggle.
"That was fun," he said.
His father, whose name also is Robert and is his almost constant companion, told him they would come downtown often.
"We're going to spend a lot of time down here," he said. "We're going to come down here just for the heck of it."
Walking through the basement of the State of Illinois Building, Taylor stiffened when he saw police officers patrolling. "They've got cranks everywhere," he said, using prison slang for guards.
Taylor went to the secretary of state's office with his Social Security card, which his parents held for him while he was locked up, a letter from Tepfer explaining he had just been released from prison and a copy of the Tribune story documenting his case and release.
Savory, who had taken other exonerated inmates to the office, was a fixer of sorts. He marched Taylor to a supervisor and the front of the line. Taylor filled out forms, took a photo for his card, then gazed at it with a slight smile, as clerks congratulated him. It did not go unnoticed that he received a warmer welcome from the secretary of state's office than he did from prosecutors, who refused to acknowledge he was innocent, much less apologize to him.
As Taylor prepared to leave, a supervisor, Larry Sneed, approached him and shook his hand.
"Welcome home, Mr. Taylor," Sneed said. "The sky's the limit."
smmills@tribune.com