A man who says Chicago police beat him into confessing to the 1992 murder of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis is a step closer to finding out whether he’ll get a new trial.
One of Anthony Garrett’s attorneys battled a Cook County prosecutor in closing arguments Monday afternoon at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.
The attorney, Jennifer Blagg, argued that retired Detective Richard Zuley, 79, coordinated her client's torture. She tied the case to alleged Zuley-led coercion in a string of cases from 1987 to 2003, including four murder convictions that were later thrown out.
“He’s never in the room when the worst stuff happens, but he doesn’t have to be [because the officers] are all working together,” Blagg said.
She also likened Garrett’s case to torture that happened when Zuley was a U.S. Naval reservist at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. She recounted November testimony by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 55, who appeared via Zoom from Rotterdam, the Dutch city.
Slahi, a Sept. 11 terror suspect, alleged that Zuley subjected him to months of torture in 2003 at the notorious detention camp at Guantánamo.
Slahi wrote a memoir about the experience that formed the basis of a 2021 film drama starring Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch.
“The real Dick Zuley, I would submit to the court, is the one Mohamedou Ould Slahi saw,” Blagg said Monday.
But the prosecutor, Armando G. Sandoval, urged Judge Adrienne E. Davis to disregard claims against Zuley in other cases, calling them “allegations, not findings,” and saying they “have no connection to Garrett.”
“I’m not saying everything Slahi says is false,” Sandoval said. “But the court should be careful of treating the book … or the movie as objective.”
Sandoval also cast doubt on claims by Garrett that two
