A man who spent 24 years in prison for a murder he did not commit has filed a new lawsuit accusing detectives of beating him into a false confession while allowing the man who openly admitted to the crime to walk free.
Frank Drew was released from prison in 2022 after his conviction for a fatal shooting in Evanston, Ohio, in 1996 was overturned.
He has since filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Evanston, Cook County, eight former Evanston Police Department officers, and a Cook County assistant prosecutor, alleging their involvement in his wrongful conviction.
Drew’s conviction stems from the December 12, 1996, shooting that killed Ronald Walker.
According to a lawsuit obtained by The Kansas City Star, Walker was standing at an intersection when two men approached him, shot him, and fled.
Several witnesses saw what happened and provided suspect descriptions, assisting detectives in identifying the shooter as Gregory Boyd.
Boyd admitted to being responsible for Walker’s death along with two other people, but he was released from police custody, according to the lawsuit.
The case went cold for two years. Then, in January 1998, police arrested an accused gang member, who faced up to 45 years in prison on unrelated weapons and drug charges.
The complaint claims that detectives were “still under pressure to close the then-cold Walker homicide investigation,” so they threatened to pursue charges related to Walker’s death against the accused gang member by “falsely claiming that physical evidence and other witnesses implicated (him).”
Detectives coerced the man into giving a false statement claiming Drew and another man he knew came to his house and admitted to shooting Walker, despite the fact that Drew did not match the suspect description and there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder.
According to the lawsuit, police forced witnesses to give false statements and created false police reports to back up the fabricated story.
Drew was arrested in February 1998 for an unrelated matter, and police questioned him about Walker’s murder as well.
According to the lawsuit, detectives physically struck him multiple times during the interrogation in order to coerce him into making a confession and threatened him with more physical violence if he did not sign the false statement. Out of fear, he made a false confession to the murder.
The accused gang member who falsely incriminated him testified against Drew in court in exchange for a plea deal in which he would serve half of his four-year prison sentence.
Drew was convicted and sentenced to sixty years in prison. He was eighteen years old.
It wasn’t until 2022 that the accused gang member admitted under oath that his 1998 testimony was false and that he testified against Drew to get a lighter sentence “and in response to improper police pressure,” according to the lawsuit.
Drew’s co-defendant also recanted his claim that he and Drew committed the shooting.
Drew was released from prison in 2022 following an evidentiary hearing, according to the Exoneration Project, whose attorneys represented him, but he still faces a murder retrial.
It wasn’t until March 2024 that the state dropped all of the charges against him for Walker’s shooting.
Drew’s attorneys, who are now representing him in the federal lawsuit, say there is no evidence linking him to the shooting other than “false witness statements and his own brutally coerced false confession.”
“Evanston police knew Frank was innocent but didn’t care. “They just wanted to close the case,” Drew’s lawyer, Alyssa Martinez, told Evanston Now. “They didn’t mind telling lies to get the job done. They didn’t care who the real killer was, or that they were destroying our client’s life.”
The lawsuit claims that the defendants engaged in malicious prosecution, conspiracy, and a violation of due process.
The City of Evanston stated that it does not comment on pending litigation.
