A group of attorneys specializing in wrongful conviction cases are scheduled to meet with city lawyers Friday to try to hash out how to properly inventory thousands of old homicide files contained in police station filing cabinets in apparent violation of the department's own policies.



The attorneys believe the cabinets warehoused at the city's three detective headquarters may contain crucial "street files" that were never turned over to homicide defendants as required.



An inventory of the cabinets might provide proof that for decades Chicago police handed over only a sanitized version of its investigative files before trial, withholding information that could have helped defendants serving long prison sentences, according to the attorneys.



In a letter to Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton earlier this month, one of the attorneys, Harold Winston of the Cook County public defender's office, expressed concern that police had already begun their own look at the files and that both sides needed to be part of the review.



"If the city does the cataloguing alone, there will be limited trust that the result is full and accurate," Winston wrote. "Using a transparent method will satisfy attorneys for defendants and also satisfy public opinion."



A spokeswoman for the city's Law Department could not immediately be reached to comment on the city's position on the issue or to confirm Friday's meeting with the attorneys.



The existence of the cabinets first came to light after former El Rukn gang lieutenant Nathson Fields sued the city and several detectives for allegedly framing him in an infamous 1984 double murder that put him on death row.



Fields' attorneys alleged that Chicago police buried their "street file" on the case for more than a quarter of a century, hiding potentially crucial information from Fields' original defense team as well as his lawyers in a 2009 retrial when Fields was cleared of the charges that he took part in a hit on two rivals.



The street file, which the city says was found in a filing cabinet at the Area Central headquarters sometime in 2010, included dozens of pages of detectives' notes, lineup reports and records on other purported El Rukn-connected homicides not included in the official investigative file turned over in discovery, according to Fields' attorneys.



Some of the information called into question the reliability of a key informant whose cooperation led to Fields' arrest, the lawyers contended.



After winning a federal judge's permission last year to inspect the filing cabinet, Fields' attorneys were stunned to find hundreds of homicide investigations dating as far back as the 1940s, some labeled "open" even though suspects had been prosecuted.



About 18 similar cabinets are in the same basement at the Area Central station at 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue, likely containing thousands of files, records show.



The dingy cabinet holding Fields' file took center stage at Fields' recent trial over his lawsuit against Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors. But the jury in that case rejected Fields' claims that police hid the file, finding only one Chicago detective liable for violating his civil rights to a fair trial. The jury awarded Fields just $80,000 in damages, a fraction of what he sought.



But the issue over the filing cabinets has continued to simmer in other pending litigation, including the case of Jacques Rivera, who is suing the city and individual detectives for his wrongful conviction in a 1988 gang-related slaying. Rivera 'was released after 21 years in prison when his conviction was reversed in 2011.



Citing the Fields case, Rivera's attorney, Jon Loevy, has been trying to gain access to a dozen filing cabinets housed in a first-floor storage room at the detective headquarters at Grand and Central avenues.



Earlier this year, Loevy asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Mary Rowland to order Area North detectives to leave the filing cabinets untouched until she can decide if he should be allowed to inventory them himself.



"If the city were allowed to relocate files, it could mask what information had been contained in the files and whether records were withheld from criminal defendants," Loevy wrote. "To alter these investigative files would mean the spoliation of that evidence."



The judge agreed, writing in a May 30 order that detectives' "current project to cull files located in that room shall cease immediately until further order of the court."



The attorneys meeting at City Hall on Friday want all the homicide files contained in the cabinets to be scanned into an electronic format.



To allow both sides to be present, they said, would eliminate the need for the Police Department to separately handle "potentially hundreds of individual requests."



Candace Gorman, who first uncovered the existence of the cabinets during her representation of Fields, said the process has to be transparent for it to be trusted.



"Otherwise, it's just business as usual," Gorman said. "It's a big project, but people's lives are in the balance."



jmeisner@tribune.com

