MADISON, Wis. (February 3, 2016) - Perkins Coie attorneys David Harth, David Pekarek Krohn and Truscenialyn Brooks successfully vacated a first-degree murder conviction for Teshome Campbell, wrongfully incarcerated for 18 years of a 55-year sentence in Danville Correctional Center, Danville, Ill., for a murder he did not commit.

On December 30, 2015, the Honorable Harold A. Baker of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois vacated Teshome’s conviction. On January 29, 2016, after the state’s attorney moved to dismiss the charges, Teshome was set free.

Teshome Campbell was found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury in 1998. He was one of 12 men indicted for the crime as the result of a drug deal gone wrong and an ensuing melee on Christmas morning in 1997. In December 2015, over 17 years after his conviction, the U.S. District Court allowed Teshome’s petition for habeas corpus relief and vacated his conviction, finding that during his murder trial, his attorney provided ineffective assistance of counsel and failed to interview and call to testify three witnesses in his defense. The court found that if those witnesses had been called to testify, their testimony would have been in complete conflict with the state’s case and also would have caused reasonable doubts about Teshome’s involvement in the incident that led to the death of the victim.

Perkins Coie was appointed to represent Teshome by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014. At that time, he had already served more than 15 years of his 55-year sentence. After a successful motion to expand the record on appeal, Perkins Coie lawyers argued that Teshome’s trial attorney was ineffective for, inter alia, failing to perform a pretrial investigation and failing to call at trial several disinterested witnesses to the crime. In March 2015, the Seventh Circuit issued a ruling in favor of Teshome, reversing the district court’s original denial of his habeas corpus petition, recognizing the many errors made by Teshome’s trial counsel.

After winning this appeal, the Perkins Coie team continued its representation at an evidentiary hearing in the district court to determine 1) the extent of trial counsel’s pretrial investigation, and 2) what the disinterested witnesses would have testified had they been called at trial. This involved locating a number of witnesses and calling them to provide their testimony to the court. After hearing the witnesses—and finding one of them “very strong, credible, virtually unimpeachable”—Judge Baker ordered that the petition for habeas corpus relief be allowed and the conviction vacated.

“This was a case that involved competing eyewitness testimony, ineffective trial counsel and strong support from concerned people to turn over a wrongful conviction,” said Madison partner David Harth, who led the Perkins Coie legal team. “Over the past two years of representing Teshome, we have gotten to know him and believe strongly in his innocence. We are delighted that Teshome is a free man.”

Teshome will be added to the National Registry of Exonerations, which provides detailed information about cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

Click here to read the U.S. District Court of the Central District of Illinois Final Order to Vacate.

Teshome and the Perkins team received support from the Illinois Innocence Project, which became involved with Teshome’s case in 2012, and filed a clemency petition on his behalf. The Illinois Innocence Project is an organization based at the University of Illinois, Springfield and is dedicated to releasing innocent men and women imprisoned in Illinois for crimes they did not commit.

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