On May 1, 2019, 72-year-old Lee Arthur Hester was exonerated of the 1961 murder of a Chicago elementary school teacher when he was 14 years old. The dismissal of the charges came nearly 58 years after he was convicted based on faulty forensics and a false confession coerced by Chicago police. The exoneration was the result of several years of investigation by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law and a review by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit.
On January 10, 2020, Hester, who was released from prison on parole in 1972, was granted a certificate of innocence in Cook County Circuit Court, paving the way for him to seek compensation from the state of Illinois.
In 2018, Northwestern lawyers Steven Drizin, Laura Nirider, Tom Geraghty, and Maria Hawilo, as well as Hester’s other lawyers, former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, Brian Wallach, and Daniel Scime, re-investigated Hester’s case, became convinced of his innocence, and presented Hester’s case to the Conviction Integrity Unit. The Team argued that Hester’s confession was no longer reliable and would not have been admissible in court today, that new expert testimony called into question the reliability of the forensic evidence used to convict Hester, and that newly discovered evidence strongly suggested that another suspect – a white engineer at the school — may have committed the murder.
On May 1, 2019, CIU Director Mark Rotert presented a motion to vacate Hester’s conviction to Cook County Chief Circuit Court Judge Leroy Martin Jr. The motion said the Conviction Integrity Unit had concluded that Hester’s confession “was not a reliable piece of evidence….The statement was taken under circumstances that, if they arose today, almost certainly would have resulted in the suppression of the statement and its exclusion from evidence. Mr. Hester was not advised about his fundamental Constitutional rights, and he was not permitted to have contact with his mother before making the statement.” Moreover, the review showed the confession was contradicted “in almost every material respect by the physical evidence in the case,” the motion said. In addition, the prosecution concluded that the expert testimony about blood, hair, and other materials “is no longer considered to be scientifically reliable” and was “inaccurate, misleading or based on flawed methodologies.”
Judge Martin granted a motion to reinstate the case, vacated the conviction, and the prosecution dismissed the case. Hester was granted a certificate of innocence and in April 2020, he was granted $236,095 in compensation from the state of Illinois.
Hester died in September 2022.