Antwaun Cubie, at 18, had been in the police station in Oak Park, Ill. for hours. He said police had beaten him, and was frightened and exhausted. He wanted to call his mother, and but said a detective told him he needed to sign and date a document to make the call. Cubie signed the blank page.
The signature became part of a typed, two-page confession in which Cubie supposedly admitted to fatally shooting a friend. Cubie’s legal team agrees detectives falsified the confession. “The handwritten notes were destroyed. It’s not videotaped, it’s not recorded. You don’t know what went on in there. That means these are not his words,” says Joe O’Hara with the law firm Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila in Chicago, which has taken on Cubie’s case pro bono.
The typed confession, however, was a critical part of the case against Cubie, who never had a criminal ...
