Illinois appellate judges on Thursday threw out a longtime inmate’s sentence for a double murder, paving the way for prosecutors to drop charges and overriding an unusual decision from a Cook County judge to keep the case intact even after prosecutors asked him to toss it.
At the appellate level, prosecutors again agreed with Wayne Antusas’ attorneys that the case should be thrown out, but this time they argued to a higher court.
On Thursday, the appeals court signed an order officially throwing out Antusas’ sentence, freeing up prosecutors to drop the charges. Antusas, 42, was released from Dixon Correctional Center on Thursday, his attorneys said. He had been slated for release in 2024.
It was yet another twist in a decades-old legal battle involving multiple defendants. The experience has been emotionally charged for the victims’ loved ones, who said closure has eluded them for years, and for supporters of the accused, who have long tried to bring them home.
“He was a teenager when he was arrested, now he’s in his 40s,” said Judy Royal, one of Antusas’ attorneys. “He’s really a very kind, positive person, and we’re so happy that he is going to get this, that he has the freedom he so badly deserves.”
Along with several others, Antusas and co-defendant Nicholas Morfin were convicted in the 1995 killing of two 13-year-old girls, Carrie Hovel and Helena Martin.
A quarter-century later, they found themselves at the center of a legal conundrum, when the judges overseeing their cases both said they would not agree to prosecutors’ request that they toss out the convictions.
The horrific double murder in a sedate police neighborhood on the Southwest Side made headlines through the mid-1990s. The teenage gunman, Eric Anderson, the son of a Chicago cop, opened fire trying to hit a gang rival. Instead, he shot Carrie and Helena, who were sitting in a van near an elementary school.
Prosecutors at the time said Anderson acted as part of a plot with fellow gang members, and they cast a wide net.
Antusas and Morfin were charged along with Matthew Sopron, the gang’s alleged leader, who was accused of giving the order for the shooting. If the gang members worked in concert, the prosecution theory went, they all could be guilty of murder, even though Anderson was the only one who fired shots.
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Also charged was William Bigeck, who flipped on the others in exchange for a plea deal. He was a crucial witness, and when he and others recanted, the case got significantly messier.
Sopron launched a bid for a new trial. And midway through a 2018 hearing on his innocence claims, prosecutors told Judge Timothy Joyce they had reconsidered and asked him to toss out Sopron’s conviction.
In the face of an unopposed request to toss out a case, judges generally do so. That’s what happened in Sopron’s case, as Joyce vacated the conviction and prosecutors subsequently dropped charges. Sopron and his family rejoiced.
But ever since, Joyce has doubted whether he made the right call, he said in court last year after prosecutors asked him to throw out Antusas’ conviction as well.
He didn’t think he had a choice but to throw out Sopron’s case, the judge said. But in the nearly two years since, he said he had researched the law and come to a different conclusion. Antusas’ conviction would stand.
“I believe it would be yet another error … to grant the petition simply because the parties agreed that it ought to be granted,” he said Nov. 18.
Greg Swygert, another of Antusas’ attorneys, noted the disparity in the way the same judge treated the two cases.
“You think of justice as treating everybody equally,” he said. “Well, there couldn’t have been a bigger divide between what Judge Joyce did in Sopron’s case, which is vacate the conviction, and what he did in Antusas’ case … they couldn’t have been more similarly situated, yet he treated them polar opposite from each other.”
Judge Arthur Hill, who presided over Morfin’s case, reached a legal conclusion similar to Joyce’s, saying last year he would prefer to hear evidence at a hearing and decide himself whether the case should stand.
He ended up tossing Morfin’s conviction after a hearing last month. While he strongly disputed Morfin’s claims of innocence, he said prosecutors had not successfully argued against allegations that a key witness got perks from an unscrupulous prosecutor in exchange for his testimony — perks that were not disclosed to the defense.
Joyce, on the other hand, said that after considering the evidence in the record, he would deny Antusas’ petition outright.
Antusas’ attorneys appealed the decision, an effort that ran alongside a separate appeal aimed at shortening Antusas’ sentence. Ultimately, Cook County prosecutors asked the appeals court to throw out the sentence, allowing them to drop the charges and clear the way for Antusas’ release.
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