What the Record Establishes
- The Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office has publicly acknowledged that the county wrongfully prosecuted innocent people before 2020, and built a Conviction Integrity Unit around that acknowledgment.
- The office’s written Brady policy took effect in 2022. Convictions entered before that date were obtained under no written policy at all.
- The Herman Williams vacatur turned in part on an expert opinion that existed before trial and was never disclosed.
What They Have Not Produced
- How many pre-2022 convictions have been re-screened against the 2022 policy. The office has published no number.
- Whether the Conviction Integrity Unit’s "credible new evidence of innocence" threshold excludes a pure disclosure-failure claim.
- A public log of Brady-list notification letters, by year, in any form.
Lake County has already conceded the premise. It built a Conviction Integrity Unit in 2020 and named it after a man it convicted three times for a murder DNA proved he did not commit. It wrote its first Brady policy in 2022. This petition asks the obvious next question: what happened to every case decided before those two things existed?
The county said it out loud
The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit page states that the unit was established to examine claims of actual innocence and to correct past errors “whether inadvertent or intentional.” The unit carries the name of Juan Rivera, who was convicted three separate times — 1993, 1998, 2009 — for the 1992 murder of eleven-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan. DNA testing excluded him in 2009. The Appellate Court reversed outright on December 9, 2011 and barred any retrial. He had served twenty years. The civil settlement was twenty million dollars, the largest of its kind in Illinois history.
Rivera is not the only one. Bennie Starks, Jerry Hobbs III, James Edwards, Angel Gonzalez. The pattern was severe enough that outside experts were brought in to write about how Lake County might rebuild public trust.
Then it wrote the rules down
The 2022 written Brady policy is a genuinely strong document. It rejects the narrow reading of the disclosure duty in plain language:
It is the philosophy of this office to err on the side of over-disclosure. That is, this office will not engage in a strict materiality analysis prior to disclosure. “Materiality” is not the standard for disclosure; it is a test for courts to analyze whether a conviction should be overturned because the defense was not given information.
It goes further. It says the office — not the police disciplinary process — decides what reflects on an officer’s credibility. It says a pattern of allegations may warrant an independent investigation “separate from or even despite a disciplinary determination in favor of the officer.” It says appellate opinions excusing a failure to disclose “do not form the basis of this office’s transparent disclosure policy.”
That is a better policy than most offices in the country have. The question this petition raises is the one the policy does not answer: it took effect in 2022, and it says nothing about what to do with everything that came before.
The gap this petition is aimed at
Two doors exist, and neither one fits the most common case.
The Conviction Integrity Unit requires a felony conviction in Lake County and credible new evidence supporting a claim of innocence. But a disclosure failure is not innocence evidence. A person who pleaded guilty because he never learned that the State’s own detective had written down that the proof was weak does not have new evidence that he did not do it. He has evidence that he was never given what he was owed before he decided. Under the published criteria, that person appears to have no door.
And the 2022 policy governs prosecutors going forward. It creates no obligation to look backward.
This petition asks the office to close that gap in the only way it can be closed: by treating an undisclosed-material claim as a reviewable claim, and by publishing the number of cases it has re-screened.
What this petition asks for
Five things, all of them records or numbers, none of them requiring an admission by anyone.
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Open the Rivera unit to disclosure claims
Amend the published Conviction Integrity Unit criteria so that a documented failure to disclose material under Brady, Giglio, or the office’s own 2022 policy is an independently sufficient basis for review — not only “credible new evidence of innocence.”
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Publish the re-screening count
State publicly how many convictions entered before the 2022 policy have been re-screened against it, and how many remain. One number, updated annually.
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Publish the Brady-list disclosure log
Publish, by year and with no names required, the number of Rule 3 “mere fact” notification letters the office has sent to the defense. A count is not confidential.
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Notify backward when someone is added to the list
When a witness is added to the Brady list, notify every defendant whose case that witness testified in and who is still serving a sentence or under supervision. This is the practice that produced the mass vacaturs in Cook County.
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Put the Rule 13 reports on the dashboard
The office already runs a public data dashboard. Add one field: how many written constitutional-violation reports prosecutors filed with the State’s Attorney under Rule 13 each year. If the answer is zero, publishing zero is itself the finding.
The precedent for what is being asked
This is not hypothetical. In Cook County, after a pattern of misconduct by a single sergeant and his team was established, the State’s Attorney did not wait for each defendant to prove his own innocence one at a time. The office moved to vacate convictions in bulk because the common actor had corrupted them. More than two hundred convictions were thrown out.
That is the model. Not a declaration that everyone was innocent — a recognition that when a case rests on a witness the State cannot vouch for, the conviction cannot stand regardless of what the defendant did or did not do. It is a claim about the integrity of the process, and it is the only kind of claim that scales.
Sign and add your case number
If you were prosecuted in Lake County — any charge, any year, any prosecutor — add your case number. The count is public. Your account of what happened is not.
Who has signed
How your signature is handled
Public
Your display name, your standing, your town, and your case number if you give one. Nothing else. Pick any display name you want — there is no verification step and no requirement that it be your real name.
Private
Your account of what happened and your contact details. These are never rendered on any page of this site. They exist so a demand or a filing can be written with real specifics behind it.
Not collected
No IP logging, no browser fingerprint, no third-party analytics on this form. A random token is stored in your browser so one browser holds one editable signature per petition.
What this is not
This is not a court filing and it does not toll any deadline. If you are inside an appeal window or a post-conviction window, that clock keeps running. Sign this and also talk to a lawyer.
Petitions naming individual prosecutors
Four prosecutors appear by name in the county’s own produced email record in this case. Each has a separate petition, and each asks for the same five records:
How to file this yourself, today
A petition is pressure. It is not a remedy. If you want the remedy, these are the actual instruments:
- Conviction Integrity Unit application. Downloadable from the office’s CIU page and mailed to Lake County State’s Attorney, 18 N County Street, 3rd Floor, Waukegan, IL 60085.
- Post-Conviction Hearing Act petition, 725 ILCS 5/122-1. The main vehicle for a constitutional claim after conviction.
- Section 2-1401 petition, 735 ILCS 5/2-1401. The vehicle for a void judgment or fraud on the court. The two-year limit does not run against a voidness claim.
- FOIA request to the State’s Attorney for the disclosure log in your own case. Our guides section has templates.
None of these requires a lawyer to file. All of them are better with one.