Five years after Sammie Garrett was convicted of murder, new forensic evidence indicated the victim had committed suicide
Sammy Garrett was wrongfully convicted of the 1969 murder of his girlfriend, 28-year-old Karen Thompson, who actually had committed suicide by placing the barrel of a shotgun into her mouth and pulling the trigger.
The conviction occurred because a pathologist mistook the exit wound in the victim's skull for an entrance wound, prompting two police officers to erroneously testify at Garrett's 1970 trial that, given the length of the shotgun and the location of the wound, it would have been impossible for Thompson to have shot herself.
A purported suicide note was found at the death scene in a Chicago motel, and Thompson had been in what the Illinois Supreme Court subsequently described as a “highly emotional state.” Nonetheless, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Philip Romiti convicted Garrett based on testimony of the pathologist and the police officers.
Garrett was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison, where he languished for five years until a reexamination of Thompson's remains disclosed an entrance wound in the roof of her mouth that the pathologist had overlooked.
Because the newly discovered physical evidence was consistent with suicide, the Supreme Court reversed Garrett's conviction in 1975 and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office dismissed the charges.
In 1980, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois rejected a civil rights claim brought by Garrett, holding that “Congress has not provided for damage actions against the states to redress the wrongs complained of here.”
