The four men wrongly convicted of the 1986 murder of medical student Lori Roscetti filed a lawsuit Friday accusing Chicago police, city crime lab workers and a Cook County prosecutor of framing them by coercing confessions and conspiring to present false testimony at their trials.
The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, comes less than six weeks after a judge vacated the convictions of the four men and ordered the three who remained in prison–where they had been held for close to 13 years–released.
The lawsuit describes an alleged conspiracy that grew out of the Police Department’s frustration at their failure to solve the high-profile October 1986 murder of Roscetti, then a student at Rush University medical school.
And it details how authorities allegedly coerced confessions from two of the defendants, pressured witnesses to testify against them, and then manufactured false lab testimony to help convict them at their trials.
The lawsuit names former assistant Cook County State’s Atty. Patrick O’Brien; former Chicago police Detective James Mercurio, the lead officer in the investigation; crime lab analyst Pamela Fish, as well as others involved in the case. It accuses them of malicious prosecution, false imprisonment and conspiracy, as well as intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Cop accused of defamation
The lawsuit also names Deputy Chief James Maurer, a commander at the West Side police area that ran the investigation. He is accused of defamation for making comments at the time that allegedly distorted the evidence, as well as for insisting that the four defendants were guilty, even after DNA tests showed Roscetti was raped by somebody else.
The four men who filed the lawsuit–Omar Saunders, Larry Ollins, his cousin Calvin Ollins and Marcellius Bradford–do not seek a specified amount of money, and their lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, declined to name an amount.
But as Calvin Ollins emerged from the Joliet Correctional Center last month, he told reporters that the four would seek “Shaquille O’Neal money,” a reference to the basketball star’s multimillion-dollar salary, as compensation for their wrongful imprisonment.
In a similar case, four men known as the Ford Heights Four, who were wrongly convicted of a 1978 double murder in the south suburbs, settled a lawsuit against Cook County in 1999 for $36 million. Two of the men had been on Death Row.
Zellner, who last year sought the DNA testing that helped to free the four men in the Roscetti case, on Friday repeated an earlier vow to take the case to trial and not settle.
“We are very much looking forward to presenting the case to a jury,” she said.
O’Brien, the lead prosecutor who now is in private practice, said Friday that the allegations against him were “completely false.”
John Gorman, a spokesman for State’s Atty. Dick Devine, said prosecutors in the case acted in “good faith based on the evidence” at the time. Once DNA tests excluded the men as suspects, he said the office moved quickly to drop the charges.
“We will defend Mr. O’Brien and this office at trial,” he said.
Mercurio declined comment, and Maurer and other detectives named in the lawsuit could not be reached. A police spokesman also declined to comment, citing the pending lawsuit.
A spokeswoman for the city Law Department, which will defend the officers as well as Fish and another analyst, Raymond Lenz, declined comment as well.
Found dead on West Side
Roscetti was found dead on Oct. 18, 1986, on a desolate railroad access road on the West Side after a night of studying at the university.
Police arrested the four men several months later, charging that the suspects ambushed Roscetti as she returned home to take bus fare so that Calvin Ollins could get to his Cabrini-Green public housing home.
Police said Roscetti was raped and then murdered.
Detectives claimed that Bradford and Calvin Ollins confessed, and Bradford later testified against Larry Ollins in exchange for a 12-year sentence. The other three were sentenced to life without parole.
Bradford served close to 6 years and was released, but he has been back in prison twice, most recently earlier this year after a felony theft conviction.
According to the lawsuit, the four police officers allegedly physically abused Bradford and Calvin Ollins to get them to confess. The lawsuit also alleges that police gave Bradford a written script to repeat in his confession and also forced Calvin Ollins to repeat details he was fed.
At trial, according to the lawsuit, Fish and Lenz testified falsely, helping to implicate the defendants when they should have been excluded as the sources of semen or hair found at the crime scene. DNA tests performed over the past year excluded the four as the sources of the semen and hair and pointed to two unidentified men.
