Media Complicit in Dire Verdict?
After 30 years of Chicago Media Poisoning Jury Pools, Reporters Jason Meisner and Jon Seidel Continue to shill for exoneration industry.
What role did Chicago’s media play in a multimillion-dollar award to a man who may well have beat, raped, and nearly burned a woman to death in 1982?
Quite possibly, the most crucial.
The reason is that the freeing of men from prison such as Stanley Wrice—convicted in 1983 of gang-raping Karen Byron and beating her over the course of several hours and then burning her almost to death with implements heated up on a gas stove—could not have taken place without the collaboration of the city’s bought-and-sold press.
Wrice’s 2014 release from a 100-year sentence for the crimes against Byron, along with his three prior armed robbery convictions, followed a mythology created and pushed by the Chicago media for more than thirty years, none more so than its two primary print outlets, the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times.
To obtain his release, and thus the beginning of his transformation from predator to hero, Wrice’s attorneys repeatedly invoked the image of Jon Burge and members of the police department who worked under Burge while he was a commander, often at Area 2 on the far South Side.
Why not? Inmates know that if they can push the claim that either Burge, his men, or both were dragging suspects down to a basement, beating them into fabricating detailed stories that several of them would agree to repeat in a trial eight months later, and get these same men to remain silent about the beating for decades until an “investigation” emerged that could ultimately net millions in a settlement or verdict, then why not? The city has paid out hundreds of millions in settlements on such claims. It is the perhaps the most lucrative revenue stream for attorneys in the city.
To push such narratives, inmates and their lawyers can be certain of one thing: The media is on their side.
Therefore, from the very beginning of Stanley Wrice’s quest to get out of jail and get rich, it was essential to claim the mythology of the Area 2 torture chamber.
How bad was the media coverage? Even at the time that Wrice’s conviction was vacated in 2013, the Chicago media was ignoring the unfolding evidence that many innocence claims throughout the city were false, rife with allegations of misconduct within the exoneration movement. But this evidence has been dutifully buried, ignored, or glossed over by the Chicago media machine.
Indeed, 2013 would have been a prime time for Chicago reporters to flex their journalism muscles in the case and prove themselves worthy of protecting the truth in Chicago by exploring the facts and putting them in context in a case in which a man convicted of perhaps the most brutal crimes imaginable wants to be out walking around.
A judge even nudged the reporters in this direction all the way back in 2014. After Wrice’s conviction was vacated, he and his attorneys marched into court clearly expecting to be granted the obligatory innocence certificate from Judge Thomas Byrne.
An innocent certificate is a bizarre piece of legislation allowing offenders whose convictions are vacated to petition for an actual declaration of innocence by a judge. Over time, prosecutors often don’t even bother to challenge these petitions with evidence that the original conviction was legitimate. Victims and witnesses die. Other witnesses have sudden recantations as lucrative federal lawsuits emerge on the horizon.
However, in the case of Wrice, Judge Thomas Byrne refused to grant an innocence certificate by declaring that Wrice’s claims of not taking part in the crime were dubious.
One telling passage from Judge Byrne’s ruling read:
His description of the events defies common sense. It is simply inconceivable that he would not smell the charred flesh or the scent of burning paper (or) hear the sounds of the violent assault.
In 2014 a legitimate media would have pressed the issue, particularly in the Me Too era. The crimes against Karen Byron offend human decency. The suggestion by a judge that Wrice was in fact guilty cried out for explanation. Why was he out of prison?
The local media refused to do so. Apart from short, obligatory articles describing Judge Byrne’s ruling, the media remained silent. For Jason Meisner of the Chicago Tribune and Jon Seidel of the Sun-Times, this was a revealing sign of Chicago’s doomed media. Both reporters virtually drool at the opportunity of covering any case or allegation against Jon Burge and his men, or any Chicago Police officer. But Judge Byrne’s ruling that a “Burge case” was falsely generated was greeted only by an earsplitting silence.
The media’s odd silence was ominous for other reasons, too. In his ruling, Judge Byrne cast doubt on a key witness retraction obtained by a group of students working under former Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism professor David Protess at the Chicago Innocence Project.
By the time of Byrne’s ruling rejecting the certificate of innocence, Protess had already left Northwestern in the midst of a scandal surrounding his role in other exonerations, including admissions from the university itself that Protess had lied to the university about his investigations of cases.
Judge Byrne pointed out the suspicious timing and substance of a witness retraction by Bobby-Joe Williams after he was visited by Protess’s students:
He [Williams] has only come forward with his affidavit recanting his trial testimony in anticipation of the litigation surrounding petitioner’s post-conviction petition. In fact, it was not until 2011 when he was contacted by the Chicago Innocence Project that he changed his story. His affidavit was prepared nearly 30 years after the crime occurred. The circumstances surrounding his recantation affidavit are certainly suspicious in light of Williams’ prior inconsistent testimony as it relates to this case.
The refusal of Meisner and Seidel to flush out this crucial subplot in Wrice’s odyssey from prison to wealthy folk hero is illuminating. The validity of claims that witnesses and Wrice were beaten was a central issue in the trial. Part of it was a pattern and practice claim against the two defendant police department members who worked it. Wrice’s lawyers paraded several other men up to the witness stand who claimed they were beaten by other detectives, as well.
Defense attorneys attempted to discredit these witnesses by painting them as lacking any credibility.
Yet Meisner and Seidel wholly ignored the pattern and practice evidence against Protess and his students, even though a judge added to it in the Wrice saga. Their willingness to do so is a powerful sign of just how far the local media will go to preserve their anti-police narrative, particularly on an alleged Burge case.
As the trial got underway, Seidel continued delivering for Wrice. In an article, Seidel wrote about the background of the case:
“Judge [Byrne] stopped short of calling Wrice an innocent man. He said there was “substantial evidence” that Wrice participated in a brutal, September 1982 gang rape and assault of a woman on the south side.
Yes, Judge Byrne stopped very short in calling Wrice an innocent man, so short in fact that Byrne called him likely guilty of participating in the crime. Would Seidel describe a dead person as having fallen short of living? And shouldn’t Seidel at least mention the fact that the sexual assault on Byron included almost being burned to death, that she spent thirty days in the burn unit at Loyola University getting multiple skin grafts?
But more than anything was the media’s decision to completely ignore a key witness who emerged in the case and testified at court. During the course of discovery, Jennifer Scott came forward with a chilling narrative about Stanley Wrice.
She claimed that Wrice began raping and beating her around the age of 14 and impregnated with her first three children. From her deposition.
Q. Okay. Do you remember the first time that— When he was violent with you, was he always violent and there was sex involved, or was it sometimes just violence with no sex?
A. Sometimes violence without sex, yes.
Q. Okay. Do you remember the first time he was violent with you?
A. Only thing I know, it happened in 1978 during the time I conceived my child…
Q. Why did you go over to the Wrice residence?
A. Because— Let me get this explained straight again. We’re talking about Stanley Wrice, abusive person. This is what he does. And he came to get me, lured me back down there to do what we had to do.
Q. Okay. How did you lure you? I’m just trying to understand.
A. He— We would fight, drag, do anything of that nature.
Q. Okay. Did you tell your mom?
A. I didn’t tell my mother because she’s— Pretty much, he would tell me to—say, if my mother finds out, she was going to get hurt.
Q. Okay.
A. Or anybody else that found out…Because he was type of person that would try to grab you or do any harm to you. Because I had to go to school and everything of that nature, or whatever. And he would be there.
Q. Okay. But he never grabbed you off the street?
A. He has done stuff like that, yes.
Q. Okay. Well, when did he do that?
A. In the year of 1980— Like I said again, from ’79 to ’82, I been abused by Stanley Wrice…
For some curious reason, the judge in the federal civil trial prohibited Scott from testifying about being beaten, raped, and impregnated by Wrice. Scott did, however, testify that Wrice’s alibi of leaving the house to call her from a pay phone at the time Karen Byron was being gang-raped, beaten, and burned was untruthful.
Nevertheless, Scott’s testimony against Wrice has been on the public record for years, yet neither Meisner nor Seidel chose to cover it. Their failure to do so points out a central truth about Chicago progressive media: Women’s rights take a distant second place to their manic war on Chicago police officers.
Perhaps there was at least some silver lining in the Wrice victory. Throughout the trial, attorneys for the city came and went, watching carefully. A stormy trial with aggressive battles between attorneys on both sides, city attorneys seemed aghast at the evidence against Wrice, and they seemed to finally embrace the reality that at least some of the accusations against police officers, even those who worked for Burge, are false.
Perhaps, too, the city attorneys are coming to see that the Chicago media, particularly outlets like the Tribune and the Sun-Times, will never be fair in their coverage of police misconduct cases.
And lastly, the city attorneys must finally be awakening to the fact that stopping the exoneration industry is essential to preserve the city from chaos and bankruptcy.
