Josh Tepfer Pioneers Mass Exonerations For Wrongfully Convicted

By 2015, tired of writing as many grant applications to fund his salary as he did legal motions to free his clients, Tepfer took a job with the University of Chicago’s Exoneration Project. That’s how he found himself as the new guy, filling in for an established lawyer on a perfunctory court date — a hearing to schedule yet another hearing.

As he sat in the courtroom waiting for the case to be called, he flipped through the case documents. “Ben Baker,” the file read. He’d been convicted in 2006 of possession of drugs with the intent to distribute. The judge in the case handed the 32-year-old Baker an 18-year prison sentence. But Baker had claimed the Chicago police sergeant assigned to the public housing project where he lived with his wife and children had planted the drugs on him. Then planted them on his wife.

But Tepfer knew that very same sergeant, Ronald Watts, had later been charged and convicted of extorting money from a drug dealer who turned out to be an FBI informant. In other words, Watts’s conviction aligned with what Baker had said all along at his trial.

And if Watts did this to Baker, how many more people were sitting behind bars because of a criminal cop?

“This could be huge,” Tepfer told his wife, Beth Sauers, when he returned home that evening.

Now he just needed to prove it.

He gathered stacks of documents, each detailing another claim by another person that Watts had derailed their life. Not that Tepfer needed any papers to prove that Baker wasn’t Watts’s only target. He only needed to look over his shoulder to the courtroom gallery, where he’d see Baker’s wife and fellow frame-up target, Clarissa Glenn.

She had drawn Watts’s ire — and then criminal charges — after she filed formal complaints against him and his crew for his abusive and corrupt practices. The police officers then claimed that they’d found cocaine in the couple’s car. Though it wasn’t true, Glenn didn’t want to risk prison time and the prospect of leaving the couple’s children with both parents behind bars. In exchange for her guilty plea, she received probation. But the collateral costs to Glenn and her family weren’t outlined in the plea agreement.

She had, for the first time in her life, a criminal record. She lost her job as a home health aide she’d held for years. The public housing complex where the family lived barred anyone with a felony conviction from living there, so they were forced to move.

Glenn’s complaints against the officers were among the stacks of paper on Tepfer’s desk. He picked through the piles for weeks. By Dec. 15, 2015, Tepfer had assembled a petition to toss out Baker’s conviction that he considered so compelling that he told Baker’s sister he’d be home by the new year.

But Tepfer didn’t consider his work over in Baker’s case. During one court hearing, Tepfer interrupted with a new request. He asked the judge to file one more request for yet another exoneration: that of Clarissa Glenn.

Glenn, in the gallery, gasped.

Even as she watched her husband work to clear his name, she’d resigned herself to a criminal record — justified or not.

The judge, Leroy K. Martin, winced as he ruled against her, citing an Illinois law that prevented people who didn’t serve prison time from pursuing formal claims of innocence.

“I hope I’m wrong, Ms. Glenn,” Martin said as he denied her from the bench. He advised Tepfer to file an appeal.

But Tepfer expected the ruling. So he’d already prepared a brief to the appeals court.

“He was two steps ahead,” Glenn said. “He went above and beyond.”

The appeals court didn’t mince words in its decision. Glenn, and by extension other probationers who were later able to prove their innocence, qualified to have their names cleared and receive state-mandated compensation provided to exonerees.

“He literally changed the law,” Glenn said.

Tepfer could have filed away the rest of the papers representing people who’d complained about Watts and his crew. He’d freed Baker and cleared Glenn. But just as Tepfer’s work in Terrill Swift’s case had elevated his profile among lawyers, the Baker and Glenn cases made him a household name among their former neighbors in the Ida B. Wells housing project where Watts had patrolled.

His phone rang constantly with calls from inside the prison and relatives outside of it. The same thing happened to me, the messages said. Glenn, too, knew of other people targeted by the same officers and connected them with Tepfer. Soon the list he kept morphed into a spreadsheet. New lawyers came on to help him keep up with the streams of cases attached to Watts and company.

Rather than trying to overturn the convictions of each and every new client tied to Watts, Tepfer decided to group 18 of their cases together. He’d emphasize the pattern of the misconduct rather than the innocence of the individual.

“I just made it up,” Tepfer said of his approach.

By September 2017, Tepfer filed his new concoction of a petition. Even if the tactic didn’t work, he figured, he would still advance the cases by placing the reform-minded Foxx under pressure to examine them.

The evening before he would argue that all 18 clients in the Watts petition deserved to be exonerated, he and a colleague worked late into the evening. Then the phone rang. It was Foxx’s lead deputy. All of the convictions would be tossed the next morning.

Headlines about Tepfer leading Chicago’s first mass exonerations appeared in the papers and led the evening news. Closing those cases should have shortened his client list, but instead, it exploded. More and more people who had similar claims about Watts jammed his phone lines. After vetting each case, Tepfer and his colleague started filing petitions, asking for exonerations of more than 100 people in one. Then another 188 in another.

The cases sent Tepfer back in front of Judge Martin, usually on Tuesdays, so frequently that the judge took to calling them “Tepfer Tuesdays.”

Yet for all the numbers, Tepfer knew that each case represented a person — a person grievously wronged by the police, the courts, and probably many other social systems along the way.

He made it a point to know every one of the people whose names he typed in his legal briefs.

One was Eson Claybron, whom Watts targeted twice. At the time of his first unlawful arrest, Claybron was a promising student and football star with bright prospects for college scholarships. But after he refused Watts’s demand for money, he found himself taking a plea deal for drugs he knew weren’t his. His college dreams vanished. A remix of the same situation happened a year later, in 2007, when Claybron left his cousin’s apartment at the wrong time and ran into the wrong officers. With two convictions to his name, Claybron didn’t expect much when Tepfer took his case.

Coming from his neighborhood, Claybron said, “You always expect the worst. And if something happens that’s good, you got lucky.”

After meeting Tepfer, though, his mindset changed.

“It’s like a chance that good stuff could really happen to you,” he said. “It just opened my eyes to the possibilities.”

In the Watts cases, Tepfer and his colleagues freed 183 people, making his name so synonymous with the phrase “mass exoneration” that Tepfer’s picture popped up on Google as a search result. His colleagues at the Exoneration Project wondered if he was up for a new challenge.

It was one thing to clear people of drug charges — awareness around unfair sentencing laws had shifted the public’s sympathies — but could he lead a mass exoneration of those wrongfully convicted of murder?