A Chicago man who spent nearly three decades languishing in prison, serving time for a murder he did not commit, finally has been freed.
Robert Johnson was 16 when police walked him out of his grandmother’s home in April 1996 and arrested him for the murder of Eddie “Jay” Binion.
Binion was fatally shot during a home invasion when a group of masked men stormed his apartment and then took off with drugs and cash.
The next day, police arrested Johnson’s friend and two other teenage boys whom prosecutors coerced into pinning the murder on Johnson in exchange for plea deals, according to the Exoneration Project.
The night of Binion’s murder, Johnson had gone to the convenience store to pick up groceries for his grandmother. His father attested to seeing Johnson leave and return to the apartment building with the groceries.
However, the alibi and the corroborating witness statement weren’t enough to release Johnson from police custody.
He was convicted of murder, home invasion, and armed robbery and subsequently sentenced to 80 years in prison.
“I was just feeling real hopeless. I was going to prison for something I didn’t do. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I used to sit there, and it was something that almost drove me crazy,” Johnson said. “Every time a phone ring, I used to think … Maybe that’s them to say, ‘Yeah. We made a mistake, let him go.’”
For years, Johnson worked tirelessly to overturn his conviction, writing and submitting motions himself without legal help, adding that he “wrote hundreds of letters, begging and pleading with different lawyers, organizations, just trying to get someone to take a look at my case.”
In 2018, the man who admitted to killing Binion died.
Shortly after the 1996 shooting, Binion’s sister, Evelyn, told police that Tramaine Taylor bragged that her brother was his “first kill” and said that he “screamed like a little b****” when he shot him.
However, police told her she was wrong when they presented photos of Johnson and Taylor and she pointed to the photo of Taylor to identify him as the shooter.
Then, starting In 2001, two of the co-defendants who implicated Johnson recanted their statements through several written affidavits that said Johnson neither planned nor executed Binion’s murder. However, prosecutors questioned their initial affidavits, noting that they never named Taylor as the actual shooter until after his death.
During an evidentiary hearing last August, Johnson’s legal team presented a mountain of evidence proving Johnson’s innocence.
Those co-defendants also testified that the detectives who investigated the murder abused and coerced them into incriminating Johnson. Those detectives, James O’Brien and William Moser, have a documented history of abuse and coercion claims, including more than a dozen lawsuits naming O’Brien that cost the city of Chicago $30 million in settlements.
A judge vacated Johnson’s conviction on Feb. 19. The next day, he walked out of the Menard Correctional Center a free man.
“They had me in that cage for 28 years and 10 months for something I had nothing to do with,” Johnson said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “I’m just thankful that we got in front of a judge that was honorable and that was fair and finally put an end to this nightmare, this hell on earth that I’ve been dealing with since I was 16 years old.”
He says he plans to raise awareness for other people who were wrongly incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.
“There are a lot of people in prison for things they didn’t do … The public, it’s like they see it on the news, but it’s like they don’t relate to it, for some reason they don’t understand it is a reality,” he said.
Johnson said that right before his case was revisited in court, the state offered him a plea deal: time served in exchange for a guilty plea. He refused.
For Johnson to receive compensation from the state of Illinois for his wrongful conviction, he has to file a petition to receive a certificate of innocence, which will allow him to start the legal process for damages.
