Date: Wednesday, August 9, 1995 Source: By Gary Marx, Tribune Staff Writer. Section: TEMPO Copyright CHICAGO TRIBUNE PARDONED AFTER 15 YEARS IN JAIL FOR A CRIME HE DIDN'T COMMIT, JAMES NEWSOME IS STILL SHADOWED BY A DOUBT Shading his eyes from the harsh sunlight, James Newsome is slouched in a white plastic chair in the courtyard of a downtown Chicago apartment complex talking about what other people think he should be doing. They want to know why Newsome isn't starting fist-fights, screaming and yelling like the bitter, angry man everyone expects him to be. Why is he so nice, so even-tempered, so apparently unaffected by the 15 years he spent in prison for a crime he didn't commit? "A lot of people say to me, `Man, if I was you, I'd be angry as a hornet,' " says Newsome, 40. "People think that I should go to the top of this building and get a rifle and just shoot down on people. They are angry for me. They feel bad for me." Newsome spent 15 years of a life sentence in Illinois' toughest prisons for the 1979 murder of a South Side grocer. Cook County prosecutors had wanted him executed. They had an eyewitness who said Newsome did the shooting. Newsome told anybody who would listen that he didn't pull the trigger, wasn't even near the crime scene. Finally, last January, Newsome was freed from prison after fingerprints taken from the crime scene strongly indicated the murder was committed by Dennis Emerson, a Death Row inmate convicted of killing a young woman in 1979. Last month Gov. Jim Edgar pardoned Newsome for the crime and ordered his criminal record expunged. A big part of Newsome wants to put the whole nightmare behind him. A deeply religious man, Newsome says life is too short to be consumed by bitterness. He is set to finish his master's degree in criminal justice at Governors State University in University Park next year and is planning to apply to the University of Chicago Law School. He wants to become a big-time corporate lawyer. But Newsome's past won't go away. When he talks about his case, about all those years in prison, his smile and easygoing manner dissolve. His muscular body tightens. His deep voice takes on a hard edge. Newsome cannot accept that the criminal-justice system made an honest mistake in prosecuting and convicting him. He says that racist law-enforcement officials conveniently pinned the murder on a young black man with no clout. He says the evidence was there the whole time to exonerate him, if only the Cook County judicial machine had slowed down long enough and cared enough to take a good look. Newsome is also angry that despite being pardoned by Edgar, many people treat him as though he were guilty, or permanently tarnished by his prison experience. Newsome says he's having problems finding work and wants at least several hundred-thousand dollars in compensation from the state or the City of Chicago for the 15 years he spent behind bars. Lawsuits are planned. And Newsome backers are talking to Edgar staffers and state legislators about setting up a compensation fund that would pay him far more than the $35,000 state law permits in wrongful-conviction cases. Money will help salve some of Newsome's deep wounds, but it won't make him whole again. Newsome wants dignity and respect, though he knows that nobody is going to hand it to him. "I'm not stupid," says Newsome, his voice rising in anger. "We live in a racist society. I'm a black man in a world where we have been historically relegated to second-class citizenship. And now I have to deal with this stigma, this social scar. I've been relegated to third- and fourth-class citizenship. But I'm not going to let it stop me. Why should I?" - - - Oct. 30, 1979 was a bright, sunny day in Chicago. At about 1:40 p.m., a customer dressed in black walked into Mickey's Grocery Store, 8911 S. Loomis St. According to court records, Mickey Cohen, 72, the store owner, was sitting on a stool besides the cash register. His assistant stood next to the produce counter. During the next 15 minutes or so, the customer took several items - including two packs of Kool-Aid, a Pepsi and a milk carton - to the front of the store to be rung up at the cash register. Cohen spotted a gun butt sticking out of the customer's pants. Cohen nervously grabbed a gun hidden under the counter, shoved it into his pocket and walked to the corner of the store. The customer suddenly pulled the revolver from his belt, and shouted, "Don't do it, old man!" as he spotted Cohen pulling a gun out of his pocket. Two shots rang out as Cohen's assistant sprinted into the store's walk-in cooler. Cohen was killed by gunshots to his head and neck. Chicago police and homicide detectives cordoned off the area around Cohen's store and began questioning two witnesses, including Cohen's assistant. They later dusted off store items handled by the gunman and pulled off 16 fingerprints. One of the witnesses told police the gunman was a black male, about 5-foot-9, 145 pounds, with a medium build and a neat, Afro-style haircut. By then, police had also learned from another witness that the gunman may have fled the area in a green Ford. A copy of a composite sketch of the suspect was quickly sent to all city police stations. - - - On Oct. 31, 1979, James Newsome, who grew up on Chicago's South Side, was back in Chicago from Hawaii, where he had been working as a photographer and living with his girlfriend and her young daughter. The day after Cohen's murder, Newsome was helping a friend, Marvin White, has received. The day after he was freed he was interviewed by Bryant Gumbel move from an apartment in western Wrigleyville to one in Edgewater. Newsome had borrowed his brother's car, a 1972 green Ford LTD. They were driving to the Wrigleyville apartment at about midnight when Newsome spotted a police car, which suddenly flashed on its emergency lights. "Pull over! Pull over!" one of the officers shouted at Newsome's car using the squad car's loudspeaker. "What were they stopping me for?" Newsome remembers thinking. "I wasn't violating any traffic laws." Newsome and White were taken to the 23rd District station at 3600 N. Halsted St., where police began interrogating them about the robbery of a woman in the area the previous day. Suddenly, a police sergeant walked into the interrogation room holding the composite sketch of Cohen's murderer and a description of the green Ford police believed the gunman used to flee the murder scene. In response to police questioning, Newsome said the green Ford the two men were riding in belonged to his brother. The police asked Newsome where he lived. He told them he was staying with his mother on South Peoria Street, which was about a mile from Cohen's grocery. The police let White go. When they did that, Newsome recalls, "I got really nervous. I said , `These people are serious.' " At 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 1, Area 2 homicide Detectives John McCabe and Raymond McNally picked Newsome up from the District 23 station and drove him to Area 2 headquarters. Newsome was identified in a lineup by two witnesses as Cohen's killer. A third witness also picked Newsome out of a lineup, saying he literally bumped into Newsome near Cohen's store several minutes before the murder. "I was irate," recalls Newsome, after being told by McCabe, McNally and an assistant state's attorney that he was being charged with murder. "I said: `What the heck are you talking about. You got me for murder. I ain't committed no murder.' " "From that point on, they started manufacturing the case against me," claims Newsome, who had no prior felony convictions. "I thought my world had ended." During the trial, Newsome's girlfriend and her two sisters testified that Newsome was with them watching TV soap operas at the time of the murder. But Newsome says his attorney, William Wise, failed to vigorously cross-examine prosecution witnesses or try to learn the identity of the person who left the fingerprints at the crime scene. Wise refused to comment on the case for this story. Assistant State's Atty. William O'Connor argued that the testimony of Newsome's alibi witnesses wasn't credible, especially that of Newsome's girlfriend, who he said was a convicted burglar and thief. And he downplayed the fact that the fingerprints taken from the store items handled by Cohen's murderer didn't match Newsome's. On Sept. 26, 1980, Newsome was convicted of armed robbery and murder. In February 1981, he was sentenced to life in prison. Moment of truth James Newsome remembers the telephone call as if it happened yestersday. It was 4 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1994. Newsome was locked in Cook County Jail's Division 1. After surviving 15 years in violent, gang-controlled jails and prisons, after working tirelesly in prison law libraries preparing appeals and other documents to get his conviction overturned, after enlisting the help of renowned U. of C. Law School professor Norval Morris and noted defense attorneys Louis Garippo and Richard Kling, Newsome had persuaded the Cook County Circuit Court to order that the fingerprints taken from the Cohen crime scene be run through the Police Department's fingerprint computer system to see if they matched any of those on file. Newsome dialed the telephone. It was a routine call to Kling to get an update on his case. Chris Scott, Kling's assistant, picked up the telephone. Scott told Newsome they had just learned that the fingerprints taken from the Cohen crime scene matched those of Dennis Emerson, now a 45-year-old Illinois Death Row inmate who at the time of the Cohen murder was out on parole after serving three years in prison for armed robbery. Newsome went back to his cell and sat down, desperately trying to contain himself. Then he got up and telephoned his mother. "Momma, I'm coming home," Newsome told her. "I'm coming home for real. They found the guy who committed the crime. They found it through the fingerprints." There was a long silence. Irene Newsome began to cry. "I'm so happy to hear that," she recalls telling her son. "Thank God." Less than two weeks later, Cook County Chief Judge Thomas Fitzgerald ordered Newsome released from jail and restricted him to home monitoring while prosecutors reviewed the evidence and decided whether to retry him. On Jan. 4, 1995, Assistant State's Atty. Scott Nelson told Fitzgerald that the state would drop the case against Newsome. Newsome's conviction was then set aside, and Edgar granted the pardon with the recommendation of the state Prisoner Review Board. Nelson says his office has not decided whether to charge Emerson with Cohen's murder. "I finally felt vindicated," says Newsome. "I had defeated a criminal-justice giant. Fifteen years ago, they told me that I would never walk the streets again in my life. What did I do? I slayed a giant--a criminal-justice giant." Newsome's questions Now, Newsome wants to know why prosecutors, detectives and his own attorney didn't make a greater effort to find out whose fingerprints were on the items handled by the gunman in Mickey's Grocery Store, though he acknowledges that at the time of the Cohen murder it was difficult for Chicago police to identify fingerprints taken from a crime scene. Such comparisons were done by hand, using the hundreds of thousands of fingerprints police had on file. It wasn't until 1986 that Chicago police acquired an automated system that allows investigators to feed a fingerprint taken from a crime scene into a computer that compares it with other prints on file. But in 1982, just one year after Newsome was sentenced, the FBI had the same capability, according to bureau spokesman Paul Bresson. And in 1982, the FBI almost certainly also had Emerson's fingerprints on file. Theatrice Patterson, the Chicago police fingerprint expert who handled the Cohen case, said Chicago police automatically send the FBI a copy of the fingerprints of people arrested for serious crimes. The FBI's Bresson refused to say when the bureau received Emerson's fingerprints. But Newsome thinks that Detectives McCabe and McNally and prosecutor O'Connor should have taken prints from the Cohen murder scene and sent them to the FBI to check against its files. McCabe and McNally said Chicago police rarely ask the FBI for help in analyzing fingerprint evidence. McNally testified during Newsome's trial that he only sought to discover if the fingerprints belonged to Newsome, Cohen or the witnesses. "His job is to see that justice is done, not to see that a conviction is made," Newsome says. "When you have fingerprint evidence that may identify an offender, you are supposed to reconcile it. He should have tried to identify the fingerprints. He asked for the death penalty. I was a whisker away from getting the death penalty. I could have been executed." Was racism a factor? Newsome has a hunch why officials didn't try harder to discover the identity of the real killer. Newsome is black. Mickey Cohen was white. So are McCabe, McNally and O'Connor. There were no blacks on the jury that convicted Newsome, though the three main prosecution witnesses were black. "In the most polarized city in the world, racism was a factor," says Newsome. "I was a suspect and I was convenient. It was a good way of clearing this case up without saying: `Listen, suppose we don't get an identification with the fingerprints and we let this guy go. How can we appease the fears of the white community? How can we explain that? Let's use this guy as a scapegoat.' " McCabe and McNally, who are still Area 2 detectives, and O'Connor all say racism played no part in the Newsome case. O'Connor says the fingerprints found on the store items could have belonged to anyone ranging from the person who made the items to the individuals who transported them to various customers. He also says offenders often don't leave fingerprints at a crime scene even if they've touched certain items--something supported by Patterson, the police fingerprint expert. Fingerprints are often smudged or unusable. "Newsome was not railroaded," says O'Connor, who now lives in Wisconsin. "I had three eyewitnesses who identified him as the perpetrator of the crime. They had no reason for framing him. Their stories were consistent. A jury convicted him. That's the way the system works." But Newsome says O'Connor, along with McCabe and McNally, should have known that eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, especially in a case like Newsome's, where there is no direct physical evidence linking him to the crime. C. Ronald Huff, a criminal-justice professor at Ohio State University, says a study he just completed indicates that eyewitness error is one of the primary reasons for wrongful convictions. Huff says the memory of people who witness a violent crime is often sharply impaired by emotional trauma. "Everybody except jurors know that eyewitness testimony can be unreliable," says Huff, who is co-author of the forthcoming book "Convicted But Innocent." "Jurors think, `What could be more powerful testimony than someone who was there?' They believe that if they were there and saw the crime, they would know what happened." Kenneth Hikida, a manufacturing engineer from Oak Forest who was the jury foreman in Newsome's trial, says he and other jurors believed the eyewitness testimony against Newsome and bought O'Connor's argument that Newsome could have handled the store items without leaving fingerprints. He now feels sick about what happened to Newsome. "I feel terrible that he was an innocent man," Hikida says. "I feel very badly that he spent so much time in prison. If you speak to him, please apologize for our error. But given the evidence, it was the only decision we could reach. "I do wish him well," Hikida said. Finding his way Since his release from prison, Newsome has managed to maintain his equilibrium, despite his anger about the case and all the public attention he has received. The day after he was freed he was interviewed by Bryant Gumbel on NBC-TV's "Today" show. His face was plastered all over the local news. Newsome has a scholarship at Governors State, which pays for his schooling and provides him a $400 a month stipend. And other individuals who Newsome doesn't want to name are also supporting him financially until he can pay his own way. Newsome also helps support himself by speaking at churches, civic groups and journalism classes. He talks primarily about his own case, the faults in the criminal-justice system, his opposition to capital punishment, and the need for people to persevere even under the most difficult circumstances. "There are innocent people in prison," Newsome says. "I'm not an aberration. I am an aberration in this sense: I worked hard every day to see fit that my situation was corrected." Newsome has come too far, struggled too hard, to let anyone stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a big-time lawyer and enjoying his freedom. "I've always been a driven, ambitious person," says Newsome. "I've always been aggressive. I've always defied the odds."