New trials ordered for 4 in 1994 rape, murder
By Steve Mills, Tribune Reporter
A Cook County judge today ordered new trials for four men who served long prison terms for a 1994 murder and rape.
Paul Biebel, the presiding judge at the Criminal Courts Building, said he based the decision on DNA evidence recovered from the victim and linked to a convicted murderer.
The four were teenagers when they were convicted in the slaying of 30-year-old Nina Glover in the Englewood neighborhood. All confessed.
Michael Saunders and Harold Richardson are still in prison. Terrill Swift is out on parole. Vincent Thames has served his sentence but must register as a sex offender because of the rape conviction.
At a hearing last month before Biebel, Joshua Tepfer, an attorney at Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, said a recent DNA test linked Johnny Douglas to Glover’s murder. Before he was shot to death in 2008, Douglas was convicted of murdering another woman, acquitted of a second homicide and was a suspect in other murders and sexual assaults.
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