Off Duty: The Sentence

By August 2023, when Judge Lynn denied Alex a new trial, Jennifer and Eric had been obsessively working on his case for more than three years, but it hadn't been enough.

“In order to be successful in this job, you have to have a tenacity and a will to keep”

fighting and not give up. And for the first time, I really felt myself wanting to give up.

Like, just being like, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this to myself? Alex was in prison for life and as they looked around their own lives, they discovered they become captives to the case, too. I mean, it really, the termites dug in at every level in our lives. Well, I started having thyroid issues. I think I was in fighter flight all the time, so I should have everything books about that and I have jaw tension now that I used to

not have real bad TMJ. I gained 35 pounds, I think. So I was about 200, 200, and 10 pounds by the end of this. So I got depressed and it affected my relationship with my girlfriend, because I was working all the time. Even if we were having dinner, I would be on my computer, or I would be taking phone calls. I found that I lost my joy for doing things that brought me joy before. Working Alex's case was breaking them, physically, emotionally, and financially.

“And I think last year on my taxes, I made $25,000. Jennifer told me that working in the case”

pushed her back into therapy, where she found herself questioning everything she believed in as a lawyer. What I realized is it was impacting me so much psychologically, because it was a total and utter complete failure on every level of the justice system. It felt like things couldn't get any darker, and then the unimaginable happened. From the Guardian, this is off duty. I'm Alyssa Sagura, Episode 6, The Sentence. By the spring of 2024, Alex's son Damian is 14 years old.

He lives with his mom, Amanda. Alex is girlfriend, and she does her best to keep him safe and out of trouble. Both she and Alex are adamant that Damian have a different kind of upbringing than Alex did, that he steer clear of gangs. Get a good education. Amanda sends him to Catholic school. She buys him gym equipment for their home, so he could keep himself busy inside the house and not be out on the streets. In late March, Damian goes to visit his cousins, her brother's

kids, in widening Indiana, just 20 miles outside Chicago. As Damian and his cousins walk to a neighborhood park, a car pulls up, then bullets fly. Someone calls 911. The tape I'm about to play for you is excruciating. Amanda is at work when she gets a phone call. I remember when I was told like, "You've got to go. You're someone shot." I was so dumb found out. I was like, "My son was shot. What do you mean he was shot?" I couldn't make any sense to it.

She rushes to the hospital. I couldn't get answers from anybody like the hospital. No one would tell me nothing until I get there. I'm like, "Where did he get shot?" Please say it was like, "His hand is

foot somewhere. I can be like you're never leaving my side again." When she arrives at the hospital,

she's brought into a room to talk to the doctor. He tells her he'd done all he could,

“but Damian is dead. I was at that moment, I honestly wanted to fight the doctor.”

Tell me he did all he could. I was more like, I was more in the point of, "How did this even happen?" The best anyone could guess was that Damian wasn't the target, but no explanation would ever make sense to Amanda. Not now, and not as she stands in the hospital, struggling to take in the reality that Damian has been killed. This happens to our son, and then to know

in the way that it happened is like so unbelievable. Because never there could be a million years

that someone would make me believe my son was shot. My son did not be around nothing like that. You was such a good kid. And then comes the realization. She has to tell Alex.

How is she going to hold it together enough to deliver this unbearable news? But also,

literally, how is she going to reach him? Prisoners can't receive incoming calls. They can only call out. Amanda tries calling the prison, seeing it was an emergency, and could they convey a message, but they don't. So she just has to wait for Alex to call her, which he does the next day. "I just made an oral call. That phone answered it's like, "Good morning. I just noticed a notice of Amanda was a sounded of the baby. I actually was wrong."

“And I just remember telling them, "When I tell you, you gotta promise to be cool."”

And he just went off. He was like, "Fuck to you, me. Be good." He just kept saying, "Amanda, it's how wrong." What? He's wrong. And my only words that came out of my mouth was our son left us. There's something I said. Our son, the son's gone. Our son left us.

He's screened. He's like, "No!" And dropped the phone. And I always hearing, in the background,

was like, "Hem faults of ground screened." Like, "No, my son." And I didn't know what was going on, because I didn't get to explain anything. I felt like I was going to go in a panic attack, I don't know. But as weird as when she told me that, there was like a fight breaking out in her jail, so it all was all of noise. I couldn't hear nothing. I was just like, "So tunnel vision from what she told me." And I just kept saying, "Not him, God, not him."

Making matters worse, the prison was put on lockdown. All the men had to be in their cells. No phone calls, no contact with anyone. Alex has to sit in his cell with only a few scraps of information. Did he hear that right? The Damian had left them? Well, I went back in the room and I didn't know how it has happened, where had it been. And so, you know, I was just pacing back and forth. The prison didn't, you know,

one of the weaker have your personal business out, but it was hard for me to contain it. Not sweet, which is overwhelmed you. He spends the next couple of days going over and over the call. Try to remember exactly what Amanda said. When the lockdown ends, he calls her as soon as he's allowed.

“You think when I thought I heard you tell me I saw him left us?”

I thought maybe I heard something wrong. Like, I guess I was just tweaked too quick and I just thought wrong. And so I kept saying to my head, like, no, that's not what she said. That's not what she said. It's keep myself saying in a cell or whatever. Amanda goes through it again. Tells him all the details. Listen, this Alex takes it all in. Alex makes a request to attend his son's funeral.

But it's denied. Funeral, like, all that had to do with our him. He should have been able to go go see him. Make minus any of us be in there. He should have been able to do that. Prison officials allow Alex to watch a live stream of Damien's funeral. But the signal keeps cutting out.

“I was a, in first grade, I even, like, punched this green. Last minute, uh, they work, like literally”

at the last minute, they had to hold up the funeral for a little while from it. I was a little grateful to be able to see it on her video visit. But I just feel like there's another thing that's taken from, you know, and I don't any of my freedom has been taken from me. I could have sent my son's funeral just like every, every phase of this experience is something to be taken from me.

Alex and Amanda can't stop imagining an alternate universe. One word, Judge Lynn had granted a motion for a new trial or vacated his conviction and finally released him from prison. In that universe, they leave Chicago for Florida and Damien is still alive. If he would have allowed us come home, we wouldn't have been here. We would not have

been nowhere near Chicago, but alone indeed. Never, never, never, and then Alex would have been

just been so different. [Music] After the news of Damien's death, Jennifer and Eric throw themselves back into Alex's case at

got to have some blind faith that requires some sort of fortitude that the average bearer doesn't

“have of not quitting. You have to have something within you that does not quit in this work,”

to be successful. Their next move is to take Alex's case to an appeals court. Jennifer is a mix of confident and apprehensive or maybe a bit self-dillusional when it comes to Alex's case. We're going to win, right? He's going to get out of jail, period. His son was murdered while he was in jail, you know? Like, that's worse. It's the worst. It is the very, very worst. I guess he could be murdered there, right? And we wouldn't have a chance. They were searching for every chance

they could find. But it's important to know, appeals are actually really narrow. You know, somebody would think, oh, if I learned new evidence, I can present that at the appeal

and they'll let me go. But that's not the case. Appeals are almost always limited to evidence

“presented at trial. So if there's new evidence, court can't hear it. Which doesn't matter”

really, because they don't have any new evidence. Then out of the blue, they get a call that changes everything. After the first prosecutors, Nancy Aducey and Andy Varga were removed from Alex's case. A new prosecutor named Kevin DiBony was assigned to it. In October, 2023, he's packing up some boxes of evidence to ship to storage. When he finds a computer desk that he's not sure had been shared with the defense. DiBony figures it's his duty to pass it along. He's like,

Jennifer. So we found this disk. I don't think there's anything on it. It's not a big deal. But you know, I just want to let you know that we found it. So we're going to be sharing it with you and just letting you know, okay? Jennifer and Eric get the disk and pop it into the computer. We hadn't looked at it long and Eric was like, oh my god, oh my god, you know. And I don't know if I called the prosecutor back or I texted him and I was like, there's nothing on this.

Are you effing kidding me? Are you kidding me? It's a bombshell. One thing the disk contains is the metadata from Alex's text messages on the night of Clifton Lewis's murder. Remember, he said he was in a fight with his girlfriend that night. Are you going back and forth over text? Obviously, Alex's defense attorney argued, who's texting their girlfriend right when they're about to go and do an arm robbery? So the prosecutor countered that argument with, oh, he could have just

sent an emoji. Now with this disk, the metadata could show who was right. Eric found an expert who actually could say how many characters the text message was. It was a very long text message. The metadata, she says, backed up when Alex had been telling police since the first time they

“questioned him. Other files caught their attention, too. Remember that 2012 cell phone map”

Jennifer got from the FBI, the one the prosecution hadn't shared, the map was there, on the disk. This was all great for their case, except they've been here before, finding a piece of evidence that they think should be a slam dunk, like the playstation. And yet, Alex is still sitting in

present. But here was the kicker. The prosecution could claim, hey, we never saw this evidence

that there were so many moving parts to this case, so many files. The disk just got lost in the shuffle. We didn't even realize we had it. Except, in the packet of information Kevin DeBony turned over, there was a photo of a sticky note attached to the disk with Andy's handwriting on it, mentioning Brubbottle. The fact his handwriting was on it meant he couldn't argue. I never got that disk. Clearly, he got the disk. And the fact that it said Brubbottle meant that he

couldn't say, oh, I got it in 2012, 2013, or something like that, and I forgot. I had it. Now, he was prepared to use it at trial. And there's at one point during the proper savings Nancy, a do see, makes a joke about how Andy loves sticky notes. He doesn't anymore. So, just to be clear, we don't know exactly when the sticky note was written, but we know that he had the disk by the time of Alex's trial in 2019. I told you last episode,

prosecutors have to turn over evidence that could be helpful to the defense. A principal's so sacred, a case can be thrown out if that role is broken.

The sticky note showed that Varga knew about the cell phone map, and it was never turned over.

casting doubt on Alex's guilt. They didn't cover that FBI map, suggesting that the suspect's

“phone's weren't near the scene of the crime. They'd unearth phone records, showing they hadn't”

communicated. They'd poke gaping holes in the stories of the three people who said Alex had confessed

to the murder. They'd revealed the edited police report, altered in a way that downplayed the

“injury to Alex's hand. The confessions from Tyrone in a gar though had been tossed,”

and none of that had been enough. Jennifer and Eric couldn't introduce new evidence for an appeal,

but this was different. This was evidence that the prosecution had violated the rules in the original

trial. This tiny sticky note, this three by three square of paper, opened a new pathway to bring

“Alex home. As I see it going forward, I hope it's only positive outcomes. I think we have enough to win.”

Just a matter of time. The Guardian made repeated attempts to reach Nancy Aducey in Andy Varga and their lawyers. We did not hear back. Neither Aducey nor Varga had been formally accused of wrong doing in connection with the prosecution of this case. In court papers, they denied any wrong doing. In court filings, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office argued that there is no showing of bad faith by Aducey or Varga and has denied misconduct claims. It declined to answer questions

posed by the Guardian, citing pending litigation. Judge James Lynn did not respond to our requests per comment. This is The Guardian.