0:00 He stood before the judge, and his voice didn't break.0:04 "We didn’t kill the man," Reginald Dillard said.0:07 "I didn’t kill nobody." I was there in the courtroom in January of two thousand, and I remember thinking, he believes that.0:17 Completely.0:17 But the jury had already spoken.0:20 The gavel came down, and the years began to tick by.0:24 Twenty-seven of them.0:26 Last week, we talked about the common threads in these cases, the ways justice can be unraveled by a single lie.0:34 Reginald Dillard’s story has all of them.0:37 The state’s case against him and his co-defendant, Eddie Fredricks, was built on a simple, ugly motive: they had killed Christopher Thomas because he was a police informant.0:50 But the evidence wasn't simple at all.0:53 It was a web, woven almost entirely by one man: an Elkhart detective named Steve Rezutko.1:00 And the threads of that web were people.1:03 Jailhouse informants, witnesses who seemed… rehearsed.1:07 One after another, they took the stand.1:10 There was a story about a decoy at the motel where the murder happened, testimony that felt like it was pulled from her, not given freely.1:21 There was a jailhouse snitch whose words were so questionable they were eventually stricken from the record, but not before every person on that jury had heard them.1:33 The bell had been rung.1:35 The conviction stood.1:37 For years, it felt like a closed book.1:40 But for those of us who sat through that trial, it never felt settled.1:45 Something was profoundly wrong.1:47 The real turning point didn't come with a bang.1:51 It came as a stack of paper.1:53 Two hundred and seventy-three pages, filed in October 2023.1:57 A petition for post-conviction relief.2:00 It laid out everything, piece by painstaking piece.2:04 And it led to an evidentiary hearing.2:07 That’s where it happened.2:09 The special prosecutor, a man named Nelson Chipman, stood up.2:14 And he didn't fight the petition.2:16 He agreed with it.2:17 He told the court that the state, his state, had violated Reginald Dillard’s constitutional rights.2:25 The whole courtroom went still.2:27 The violation wasn't just about the shaky witnesses.2:31 It was about what the defense was never told.2:35 During the original trial, on January fifteenth, two thousand, a woman had called the police.2:42 She told them she knew who killed Christopher Thomas.2:46 She said it was her boyfriend and his brother.2:49 Not Dillard.2:50 Not Fredricks.2:51 A police report was filed.2:53 And then it was buried.2:55 For twenty-seven years, that piece of paper, that piece of truth, sat in a file, hidden.3:02 The defense never saw it.3:04 The jury never heard it.3:06 The entire case could have been different.3:09 In February of 2026, Judge Christopher Spataro signed the order.3:14 The conviction was vacated.3:16 The murder charge was dismissed.3:18 After twenty-seven years, Reginald Dillard walked out of prison.3:23 But this story doesn't end with a man walking into the sunlight.3:28 It ends with another stack of paper.3:31 A federal lawsuit, filed just this month.3:34 It names the city, the police, the prosecutors.3:37 It calls the investigation a conspiracy to frame an innocent man.3:42 It talks about fabricating evidence, destroying evidence, and a culture of deliberate indifference.3:50 And it names Detective Rezutko, who was finally forced to resign after admitting he had paid his witnesses and informants for sexual acts.4:00 It wasn't an accident, the lawsuit says.4:03 It was intentional.4:05 Twenty-seven years.4:06 It’s a number so large it’s hard to hold in your mind.4:10 A lifetime, stolen not by a mistake, but by a choice.
