Text by Sarah Phelan
As the Chronicle reports today, the city has agreed to pay $4.5 million to John “J.J.” Tennison, who spent almost 14 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
What the Chronicle doesn’t mention is the work of former Bay Guardian investigative reporter A.C. Thompson, whose award-winning series on the case went a long way in helping to reverse the conviction of Tennison and his alleged accomplice Antoine Goff, who were sentenced to life for the execution of Roderick “Cooley” Shannon in a lonely Vis Valley parking lot in August 1989.
“After my journalistic probe, I felt fairly certain that a terrible injustice had been done, that Tennison and Goff had not killed Shannon, that police and prosecutors had engaged in dubious behavior-and that the real executioner was walking the streets,” wrote Thompson in September 2003, shortly after Tennison’s life sentence was overturned.
And while it’s a triumph of sorts that the city has agreed to compensate Tennison, whoever executed the 18-year-old Shannon almost 20 years ago, “with shotgun blasts to the shoulder and head,” as Thompson’ reported in 2001 in his kick-off piece “The Hardest Time,“is still at large.
When Thompson started digging into the case in 2001, he found that “police linked Shannon’s murder to a raging war between hoodsters from Vis Valley and Hunter’s Point. Young people-mostly African American-in the two housing project-heavy districts were waging a bloody battle for control of the drug trade, a battle that had escalated into a string of life-for-life revenge killings.”
Both Tennison and Goff had alibis, but even as Thompson dug deep and masterfully laid out at the weaknesses, flaws and inconsistencies in the so-called evidence against them, he wasn’t holding his breath that justice would be served.
“Still, I never expected the two men to go free,” Thompson admitted in 2003. “The criminal justice system is stacked against convicts who assert their innocence.”
But after another judge freed Tennison’s codefendant, Antoine Goff, who was serving 27 years to life, and a Superior Court judge declared both men innocent, Tennison and Goff sued in federal court, saying the city had violated their civil rights.
Last month, the city attorney’s office reached a proposed settlement with Tennison. Goff’s case will go on trial later this year.
But to date, former Chief of Police of San Francisco, Earl Sanders, Detective Napoleon Hendrix, and other police officers associated with the CRUSH violent crimes unit, which was involved in investigating the case, and prosecutor George Butterworth, have walked away unscathed, even though Thompson dug up all kinds of evidence that suggested that the police had engaged in misconduct in helping to put Tennison and Goff behind bars.
As Thompson’s articles revealed, witnesses were coached to lie that Tennison and Goff committed the murder. The existence of witnesses who said that the men were innocent and that another had done the killing were hidden from the defense. And when someone confessed to the crime, they didn’t tell the defense.
This malpractice of the law and malfesance lead to Tennison and Goff rotting behind bars for thirteen years. But after Thompson’s initial cover story on Tennison, The Hardest Time, came out in 2001, Tennison’s brother, who worked in a parking lot near the offices of noted defense lawyer John Keker, put copies of the article on the windshield of every car, hoping some lawyer would read it and offer to help. And that’s what happened.
Two of Keker’s associates Ethan Balogh and Elliot Peters picked up on the case and helped Public Defender Jeff Adachi and a team of lawyers win Tennison’s freedom, work ing their asses off for three years pro bono.
Thompson has previously stated that he’d like to write a book when the whole saga plays itself out, called A Black on Black Crime, “because the two homicide detectives were famous African-American detectives, and the two dudes who were framed were innocent average black dudes from the hood.”
He couldn’t be reached for comment today, but here’s hoping he’s polishing the final chapters, right about now.
