Hearing for man seeking to overturn North Chicago murder conviction
The attorney for a Chicago man seeking a new trial in a grisly North Chicago murder said Tuesday there's no DNA evidence linking his client to the case.
However, Lake County Assistant State's Attorney Ari Fisz said eyewitness testimony and motive proves Marvin Williford, 45, should remain in prison for Delwin Foxworth's murder in January 2000.
The exchange was part of the first of several evidentiary hearings in front of Lake County Judge Daniel Shanes. Williford is seeking to overturn his guilty conviction and 80-year prison sentence.
Authorities said three men entered Foxworth's apartment, beat him with a wooden board, bound him with duct tape, then used gasoline to set him on fire. Foxworth, who was 39 at the time, survived the attack by extinguishing the flames and crawling to a neighbor's house to phone police. Authorities said he died from his injuries in August 2002.
Williford was arrested in South Carolina in 2003 and convicted by a jury in 2004.
David Owens, of the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, said none of Williford's DNA appears at the scene of Foxworth's attack. However, he said, three other DNA samples were recovered from a gas can and the board using advanced DNA testing years after Foxworth's conviction.
Owens also said in court that DNA recovered from the board matches a DNA sample taken from the murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker. Staker was found stabbed, raped and strangled inside a Waukegan apartment where she and her twin sister, Heather, frequently baby-sat two small children.
Juan Rivera, formerly of Waukegan, spent 20 years in prison for Staker's murder after he was convicted by three separate juries. DNA evidence eventually exonerated him, and he was released from prison in January 2012. No one else has been charged with the crime.
Like Rivera, Williford has long maintained his innocence and never confessed to the crime, Owens said. He said no forensic evidence or past witnesses link Williford to the crime, and that Foxworth did not die from burns he suffered that night.
Fisz argued the witness who testified at trial interacted closely with Williford the night of the attack and clearly identified him to police. He also said Williford had motive because Foxworth owed Williford $20,000 plus interest, and that several people have handled the items tested for DNA since Williford's trial in 2004.
This is the latest of several DNA cases in Lake County courts in recent years. Previously, murder cases involving Jerry Hobbs, Juan Rivera and James Edwards, and rape cases against Bennie Starks and Angel Gonzalez, were overturned because of DNA evidence.