A Chicago man was released from state prison Friday more than two decades after he was convicted of a double murder in spite of evidence that he was in a police lockup when the slayings took place.
The Tribune first raised questions about Daniel Taylor's conviction in 2001, but he remained in prison for 12 more years before the Cook County state's attorney's office dismissed his conviction Friday morning during a brief hearing in the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Assistant State's Attorney Celeste Stack, who is in charge of the office's conviction integrity unit, told Judge Jorge Alonso that the office no longer opposed Taylor's appeal and would not seek a new trial.
Taylor was not in court for the announcement, but his brother, David, sobbed loudly on word of the decision.
Later, in a statement, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez said she took the action "in the interest of justice" but offered no further explanation than that her decision came after new witnesses had been interviewed and additional documents examined. She also said her office would now review the conviction of a Taylor co-defendant who also maintains his innocence in the double murder.
Hours later, Taylor was freed from Menard Correctional Center, where he was serving a life sentence.
Taylor's lead attorney, Karen Daniel of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, was out of town but said in an email that she was "happily stunned."
"Daniel, and the public, are entitled to a full accounting of the causes of this 20-year injustice," she said.
Taylor was 17 when he and seven other young men were arrested in December 1992 for the slayings a month earlier of Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook in their apartment not far from Clarendon Park in Uptown on the city's North Side. All eight confessed, pointing fingers at one another. Taylor said he was coerced into his lengthy confession by veteran detectives.
The first hitch in the case emerged moments after Taylor's confession when he recalled for detectives that he had been arrested the night of the murders. Investigators found a police report indicating that Taylor was taken into custody for disorderly conduct at 6:45 p.m. and held in a police lockup until 10 p.m. The murders occurred about 8:45 p.m.
The Tribune investigation uncovered additional information indicating Taylor's innocence, prompting then-State's Attorney dikk Devine to reinvestigate the case. Years later, in 2012, the Tribune obtained reports from that investigation showing that Devine's office took almost no steps to determine whether Taylor's alibi was accurate.
Also last year, the Illinois attorney general's office discovered after reviewing the case that the state's attorney's office had withheld information damaging to its case from Taylor's trial lawyers as well as the attorneys handling his appeal.
. Even though I'd never want to be a prosecutor (unless I was going after white collar crime and things of that sort), I remember interning as one last summer and thinking, "Damn, better it be me than some of these guys. At least I'd have empathy and conscience. Half of these guys don't care about anything but their numbers." 
