An Englewood native whose 2003 murder conviction was overturned last year filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Tuesday against Chicago police detectives, the City of Chicago, Cook County and multiple prosecutors.
Kevin Jackson, 44, was released from prison last October after spending more than 23 years behind bars for a 2001 murder despite no evidence connecting him to the shooting other than statements from witnesses, some of whom recanted before trial.
Jackson long maintained his innocence in the May 2001 shooting at a gas station in Englewood that killed one man and wounded another. He was convicted two years later and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
The lawsuit claims police detectives fabricated witness statements through coercion, created fake polygraph results and suppressed truthful statements, and prosecutors ignored exculpatory evidence during the initial investigation and again years later during a reinvestigation. The detectives and prosecutors also are accused of disregarding an alternative suspect in the shooting.
Jackson, who now lives in Rockford and works in landscaping, said filing the lawsuit feels like “the beginning of justice…for what they did to me.”
“I could never get that time back — 23 years and four months,” Jackson said Wednesday in a conversation with the Sun-Times. The “cruelty that I experienced over those 23 years, from physically to mentally and sometimes spiritually, [which] helped me get through the physical pain I experienced, the mental pain I experienced in that place, especially being there for something that I ain’t do.”
Spokespersons for the city’s law department and the state’s attorney’s office both said they have not yet been served with the lawsuit and do not comment on pending litigation. Plaintiffs did not specify compensation for the suit.
Jackson is still pushing to acquire his certificate of innocence. A hearing on his petition is scheduled for Monday.
In overturning his conviction last year, Illinois Appellate Court Judge Mary Mikva described Jackson’s case as “extraordinary.” She said the evidence brought against Jackson was “troublingly thin” and characterized the detectives’ alleged coercion as “disturbing.”
The lawsuit names former Chicago Police Detective Brian Forberg as one of the lead investigators of the shooting. Forberg has faced similar allegations of coercing witnesses to make false statements in more than a dozen other cases, but Jackson’s case is the first to be overturned on those allegations.
Forberg retired in 2023, but city records show he is employed again by CPD as a criminal intelligence research specialist.
A new investigation into Jackson’s case was launched in 2020 by the state’s attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which reviews defendants’ wrongful conviction claims.
In a memo, the unit’s former director, Nancy Adduci, concluded that “this matter requires no further review.”
Jackson’s attorneys, Brandon Clark and Elizabeth Bacon, later questioned in court whether that review could have been biased after learning that Forberg’s wife worked as an assistant state’s attorney in the Conviction Integrity Unit at the time the unit was reviewing Jackson’s case.
The state’s attorney’s office then assigned the case to two independent special prosecutors from outside the office to review the case. That report concluded, “This case presents a microcosm of the many ways in which a police investigation into a serious violent crime can fail.”
Adduci, who faced allegations of hiding evidence in another case, is suing the state’s attorney’s office over her termination in 2023.
Clark and Bacon said Wednesday that while the lawsuit is about Jackson, the case highlights a pattern of police and prosecutorial misconduct that has disproportionately impacted the Englewood community and other South and West side neighborhoods, which has led to widespread distrust in police and “the whole system of justice.”