Black defendants, white victim, false confessions, withheld evidence
Two African American men — Walter Fowler and Heywood Pugh (a.k.a. Earl Howard Pugh) — were convicted in 1937 in Cook County of the murder of William J. Haag, a white Railway Express Agency driver, who was stabbed to death during an apparent robbery on September 5, 1936. The convictions rested on signed confessions obtained by the Chicago Police. Fowler was sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison and Pugh to life. Fowler died in prison in 1948, five years before evidence of his innocence came to light. Pugh was exonerated and released in 1953 based on exculpatory information that police had hidden for seventeen years — statements from two eyewitnesses to the murder identifying another man, Eddie Leison, as Haag’s killer. In 1955, the Illinois General Assembly awarded Pugh $51,000 for his pain and suffering — $3,000 for each year he spent behind bars for a crime he did not commit. — Rob Warden
Copyright © 2006, Center on Wrongful Convictions Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University School of Law
