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  • In 1999 Alstory Simon confessed to killing two people 17 years earlier. He and his champions now say he’s innocent.

If Alstory Simon is innocent of killing two people, it’s despite confessing that he did it, and despite the dramatic 1999 courtroom scene in which Simon, tears in his eyes, told the mother of one victim, “I didn’t mean to hurt her—your daughter never did anything to me. It was an accident and she got in the way.”

With a report from Alvarez’s Conviction Integrity Unit expected soon, reporter Steve Mills brought readers up to speed in last Friday’s Tribune. He explained, “Simon contended that he was tricked into confessing by Paul Ciolino, a private detective working with then-professor David Protess and his Northwestern University students, and then encouraged to plead guilty by Rimland in spite of his innocence.”

The tape was a ruse; the witness an actor. (One wonders what would happen to a murder confession obtained by a Chicago detective who boasted he “bull rushed” it out of the suspect.) It was an amazing feat of persuasion by Ciolino, getting a man he had never met before to confess to a double homicide that had already been solved.

One detail of Simon’s confession shocked police officers. Ciolino admitted that Simon, at one point during Ciolino’s visit to his apartment, requested a lawyer. No problem, Ciolino told Simon. Then Ciolino called Chicago and obtained the services of attorney Jack Rimland, a friend of Ciolino, to represent Simon. To any police officer, such a tactic would immediately undermine the credibility of any evidence obtained from this interview. One cannot get an attorney for a person they are accusing of murder.

This move was more than enough to cast doubt on the authenticity of the confession. A detective who used such tactics would have the case thrown out immediately and would probably face penalties and perhaps even indictment. The moment Simon requested a lawyer the entire interaction should have ended.

But the opposite happened. Rimland traveled that day to Milwaukee and advised Simon to confess. What lawyer would advise their client to confess to a murder before he even spoke to his client or looked at the evidence? Rimland continued to encourage Simon to confess all the way until Simon was sentenced for the murders six months later, even though there was a mountain of evidence, including at least six witnesses, who still fingered Porter for the murder and not one witness who ever told police they saw Simon at the park that night

Rimland and Ciolino declined to discuss any of this with me. This account of their actions is drawn from depositions and testimony.

According to Mills, Simon’s lawyers maintain “Rimland was too close to Ciolino to fairly represent Simon’s interests as he faced the murder charges,” but Rimland insists “I didn’t sell (Simon) down the river” and suggests he and Ciolino weren’t as close as all that. According to Mills, Rimland “rebutted a claim that he ever shared office space with Ciolino, saying they worked out of the same building at one time but never in the same office. He acknowledged that as president of an Illinois defense lawyers group, he gave Protess and Ciolino an award but said he was the group’s only officer at the event. He said he was not sure if he represented Simon at the time. ‘A conflict? No,’ Rimland said. ‘I wasn’t the one who decided to give them the award. I was just the only who was there on that night.’”

Did he persuade an an innocent man to plead guilty? Rimland noted that Simon repeatedly said he was guilty. He reminded me that by the time Simon changed his story and said he was innocent, he was no longer Simon’s lawyer.