Darby Tillis and Perry Cobb were sentenced to death in 1979 for a 1977 murder they didn’t commit. The judge, the late Thomas Maloney, would himself be convicted on federal corruption charges in 1993.
In 1987 Tillis and Cobb were retried and acquitted. In 2001 they were pardoned on the basis of actual innocence and awarded $120,000 in compensation from the state of Illinois.
On Thursday, Rob Warden, executive director of Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, announced more good news.
The IRS has decided to stop trying to collect more than $70,000 in taxes, interest, and penalties on Tillis’s 2001 windfall.