Charges dropped against Robert Johnson after spending nearly 30 years in prison for Chicago murder
By Elyssa Kaufman
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — Charges were dropped on Tuesday against a man who spent nearly 30 years in prison for a murder he never committed.
On February 21, 2025, Robert Johnson, 45, was released from prison, after a judge vacated his 1996 murder conviction. On Tuesday, Cook County prosecutors announced in court that they would not retry Johnson, and dropped all charges against him.
Johnson, at age 16, was arrested in connection with the April 14, 1996, murder of a man who was shot and killed in a robbery in his apartment on the South Side. No physical evidence or other witnesses ever linked Johnson to the murder.
Johnson’s attorneys will soon file for a certificate of innocence, which would expunge his record.
He plans to attend the National Innocence Conference in Seattle on Wednesday.
Johnson’s prison sentence
Johnson was sentenced to prison after a teenager gave false testimony against him, according to his attorneys. The juvenile later recanted his testimony, saying police had coerced information from him.
No physical evidence or other witnesses ever linked Johnson to the murder.
Detectives on the case had previously worked under disgraced former Cmdr. Jon Burge, who oversaw the torture and coerced confessions of at least 125 people from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Burge was fired from the Police Department in 1993 — a few years before the Johnson case — after a police review board found he had tortured a suspect. He was convicted of lying about torture in testimony he provided for a civil case in 2010, and he died in 2018.
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