Paul Phillips and Lewis Gardener, who were the 15 and 17 year old co-defendants of recently exonerated Daniel Taylor and Deon Patrick, and their lawyers from the People’s Law Office and Mayer Brown LLP, on Monday, filed petitions seeking their exoneration for a 1992 double murder committed on Agatite Street in Chicago. The petitions allege that the State’s Attorneys’ Office and the Chicago Police Department withheld for decades evidence that would have definitively established the mens’ innocence, and that they, like six of their seven co-defendants, were coerced into giving gave false interlocking confessions, the details of which were supplied by their interrogators. The petitions further allege that two of the actual perpetrators of the crime have now been identified, one has confessed, and he has cleared Phillips, Gardener, and the rest of the “Agatite 7” of any involvement in the planning or commission of the crime.
As a result of their wrongful convictions, Phillips and Gardener each spent 15 years in prison and, after their 2007 release, three years on parole.
Read about Phillips and Gardner’s case here, in a Tribune article from January 27, 2014.
