CHICAGO — A Cook County judge has vacated the life sentence that a man received for a double murder and resentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Late last year, the story of Dante Brown’s resentencing effort made headlines when it emerged that a prosecutor advocating for his release on behalf of the state appeared to run an outside company that connects inmates with attorneys ready to help with their exoneration and resentencing appeals.
That story grew even bigger when the judge overseeing the case accused the prosecutor of lying about the company in court and barred her from ever practicing in his courtroom again.
Dante Brown
A jury found Dante Brown guilty of two counts of murder in a double homicide that occurred on October 6, 2003. He was 19 at the time of the crime.
His attorneys in the resentencing case presented many arguments, including their belief that the Miranda warning Chicago police provided to Brown contained language “well above” his intellectual abilities at the time. They claimed Brown was a “passive participant” in the crime, not someone in a “leadership role.”
In handwritten appeals sent from his cell at the Stateville Correctional Center, Brown has claimed that a Chicago police detective beat him with a thick phone book on the head and arms until he confessed.
And his attorneys offered another argument: Brown was sentenced to life without parole in 2009 because state law didn’t allow for anything less.
In a ten-page transcript of Brown’s sentencing hearing, Judge James Linn mentioned eight times that he didn’t have the authority to sentence Brown to anything less than the law required, one defense filing said.
The judge acknowledged that Brown’s post-conviction filings contained “wisdom” and compelling arguments, none of which could be considered because the law made a life sentence mandatory.
“The Supreme Court has spoken, and I absolutely must follow the orders of the Supreme Court,” Linn said once, according to Brown’s attorneys. “Again, my hands are tied. I must follow the law as it is. I will follow the law.”
Brown’s lawyers argued that “over 14 years later, the world Judge Linn commented on has changed significantly,” and both federal and Illinois courts now recognize “that sentencing juveniles and emerging adults to mandatory life sentences without consideration of factors that reduce their culpability is unconstitutional.”
Earlier this month, Judge Michael McHale decided the resentencing matter, giving Brown a 20-year sentence. Brown had already earned 7,580 days of credit in jail and prison. He was released from the Menard Correctional Center on August 16, the day after McHale announced his decision.
McHale ordered Brown to serve three years of supervised release and register as a violent offender for life.
Courtroom drama
Michelle Mbekeani, the prosecutor McHale barred from his courtroom, resigned from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in June, six months after being tapped to lead the Conviction Review Unit (CRU).
Within days of Mbekeani’s promotion in December, City Wire reported that Mbekeani had a side hustle: a company called PeriodSentence.com that offered, for a fee, to connect attorneys with prisoners who wanted to pursue wrongful conviction claims.
The day after the story broke, Mbekeani appeared in Judge McHale’s courtroom for a regularly scheduled hearing in Brown’s case. Unfortunately for her, McHale had seen the City Wire report. He vacated his previous decision to grant Brown a resentencing hearing until he learned more about Mbekeani’s role at PeriodSentence.
CWBChicago spoke with Mbekeani a couple of days later. During our interview, Mbekeani claimed PeriodSentence was merely a concept she developed with classmates enrolled in the New Social Ventures course at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Students in the class break into groups to develop, research, launch, and pitch a startup social venture, according to the course syllabus. The company’s website was part of the class project, according to Mbekeani, who said her group “received a really good grade.”
“The software we envisioned isn’t even built fully,” Mbekeani said, adding that the company hadn’t even been legally formed.
At Brown’s next hearing in January, the stuff really hit the fan.
The judge had read our story.
“You were quoted as saying, Period is not a real business. Is that correct?” McHale asked. “You explained that was merely a concept that you had developed last spring for that same business class mentioned before. Correct?”
“Correct,” replied Mbekeani to both questions.
“You told the CWB reporter that the company had never been legally formed, right?” McHale continued.
“Period? Yeah, Period. Not legally formed, correct,” Mbekeani replied.
After many more questions, including several about the company website, which McHale said he printed out before it was taken offline, the judge revealed that he found active Articles of Incorporation for a company called Due Tech Process Corporation, previously known as Period.
McHale said Mbekeani was listed as the company’s CEO, president, director, and registered agent.
The judge wasn’t having Mbekeani’s arguments on the topic.
“You’re — you’re fudging, and that’s fine. You’re an attorney, so I expect that,” the judge offered.
“Based on all the information that I see here, I conclude that you are, indeed, running a for-profit corporation, registered in the state of Illinois with the purpose that involves you spending your time assisting incarcerated defendants and their defense attorneys,” McHale announced. “It presents a very disturbing appearance of impropriety in the form of a conflict.”
“A prosecutor takes an oath to be an advocate of the victims of crimes, and families of the victims of crime. Our criminal courts work as an adversarial system. We have defense attorneys representing the accused on one side, and we’re supposed to have a prosecutor representing the People on the other,” the judge explained. “When those roles become entangled and blurred, as they most certainly were in this case, the public loses trust and confidence in our criminal justice system. It creates an appearance that something unethical is occurring.”
“You’re off the case,” McHale concluded.
He saved a few words for Mbekeani’s boss, Kim Foxx, though: “So, to some degree, I do sympathize with you, counsel, because in my opinion, Ms. Foxx basically set you up for failure because this was such a blatantly obvious conflict of interest that I find it shocking that she didn’t see it coming. But, indeed, as we’ve seen before, Ms. Foxx’s knowledge of conflicts law is not the best.”
In a written order after the hearing, McHale called Mbekeani’s responses to his questions “duplicitous, incomplete, evasive and untruthful.”
“In this court’s 17 years on the bench and 32 years working in the criminal justice system, it has never seen such manipulative efforts used before a judge in open court to such a degree,” McHale continued. He barred Mbekeani from ever representing the state in his courtroom again.
The judge said he even considered appointing a special prosecutor to handle Brown’s case but determined that other attorneys in the Conviction Review Unit were fit for the job.
