Background
Jerome Vonner was convicted by a Cook County jury in 1994 of first-degree murder, armed robbery, armed violence, and aggravated discharge of a firearm in connection with the November 1, 1992 shooting death of Greg Hersey. Three eyewitnesses — Suzanne A. (the victim’s former partner), her then-seven-year-old son Jason, and their friend Marita Johnson — identified Vonner despite his ski mask, recognizing his voice, his distinctive Michael Jordan sweatpants, and a haircut visible through a rip in his hood. Vonner had been a near-daily visitor to Suzanne’s apartment and had spent much of the day of the murder there. Shortly before midnight, three masked men entered the apartment, demanded drugs and money, and shot Hersey. Within minutes of the shooting, police found Vonner nearby and he made an incriminating phone call to the apartment, already knowing Hersey had been shot before being told. He was sentenced to an aggregate 55-year term.
Following an unsuccessful direct appeal and initial post-conviction petition, Vonner filed a successive post-conviction petition alleging actual innocence and requesting DNA testing of the clothing he wore that night. The circuit court granted leave to file and appointed counsel in October 2012. After nearly twelve years — during which petitioner completed his sentence — the case proceeded to a third-stage evidentiary hearing in March 2024 before Judge Marc W. Martin. Vonner offered four pieces of evidence: (1) Illinois State Police DNA results showing no blood on his clothing or on co-defendant Sean West’s coat; (2) an affidavit from trial attorney Michael Bianucci recounting statements made by the victim’s deceased mother, Mary Hersey; (3) a double-hearsay affidavit from lifelong friend Deforest Clark (who testified as Kareem Solomon-Bey), recounting that a man named Leo Gray told him that Raymond Mims, “Major,” and Delvin Payton committed the robbery and murder; and (4) a double-hearsay affidavit from Jasper Johnson, recounting that his then-girlfriend Holly Lucy showed him bloody clothes belonging to Mims and said Mims had confessed to shooting Hersey.
The circuit court denied the petition, finding that the hearsay evidence was not reliable or credible and that the absence of blood on Vonner’s clothing had minimal probative value given the circumstances of the shooting. Vonner appealed, arguing both that the evidence warranted a new trial and that the circuit court committed legal errors requiring a new evidentiary hearing.
The Court’s Holding
The appellate court affirmed the denial, concluding that Vonner’s evidence was not “conclusive” — that is, it would not probably lead to a different result on retrial when considered alongside the trial evidence. Applying the manifest-error standard of review required at the third stage (citing People v. McCoy, 2026 IL 131565, ¶¶ 51, 54), the court found no clearly evident, plain, or indisputable error in the circuit court’s judgment. The court held that even assuming any legal errors in the circuit court’s analysis of applicable third-stage standards, those errors were harmless because the evidence was far from conclusive regardless.
On the DNA evidence, the court acknowledged that the absence of Hersey’s blood on Vonner’s clothing was marginally favorable but assigned it little probative weight. The medical examiner had described the wound as a “distant gunshot wound,” meaning there was no expectation of blood spatter on the shooter; the wound was to Hersey’s chest beneath his shirt; and Vonner could easily have kicked Hersey to take his wallet without contact with blood. On the hearsay evidence, the court upheld the circuit court’s reliability findings. Neither Gray nor Lucy — the out-of-court declarants who supposedly heard Mims confess — testified under oath or provided affidavits, and Vonner offered no compelling explanation for their absence. The sole conduits for these purported confessions were two of Vonner’s lifelong friends, both biased in his favor. Solomon-Bey had publicly championed Vonner’s innocence even before Gray spoke to him. Johnson had waited decades to come forward despite admitting he quickly connected what Lucy showed him to the pending murder charges against his childhood friend — and Johnson stood to implicate a man who had since married Lucy, his own former romantic partner.
The court further emphasized that consistent double-hearsay accounts are only mutually corroborating if they are genuinely independent, a premise the circuit court had good reason to doubt. Without any objectively reliable corroboration of Mims’s alleged confessions — nothing analogous to the sworn, transcribed, witnessed confession in Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284 (1973) — the evidence could not clear the bar of admissibility as statements against interest under Illinois Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3), let alone satisfy the conclusiveness standard for actual innocence.
Key Takeaways
- At a third-stage post-conviction hearing, a court may assign whatever weight and reliability it deems appropriate to hearsay and affidavit evidence; to be “conclusive,” new evidence must probably produce a different result at retrial when considered together with the trial record.
- Negative DNA results (no blood detected on clothing) have only marginal probative value when the shooting circumstances — here, a distant gunshot wound to a clothed victim — do not create a reasonable expectation that the shooter would be blood-stained.
- Double-hearsay accounts of third-party confessions must clear multiple admissibility hurdles under Illinois Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3) and 805; corroborating circumstances must clearly indicate trustworthiness at each layer, and unexplained refusal by the primary declarants to testify under oath is a legitimate basis for a credibility finding against the entire chain.
- Consistent double-hearsay accounts are mutually corroborating only if they are independent; a court may reject claims of consistency where the witnesses are longtime friends of the petitioner with shared incentives and possible shared knowledge of the theory being advanced.
- This decision is filed under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 23 and is not precedent except in the limited circumstances of Rule 23(e)(1).
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates how high the bar remains for actual-innocence claims at the third post-conviction stage, even when a petitioner couples DNA testing results with multiple witness accounts pointing to an alternative perpetrator. Courts are not required to credit facially consistent hearsay simply because it is consistent; where the primary sources decline to testify under oath, where the intermediary witnesses have strong personal loyalties to the petitioner, and where no independent corroboration ties the purported confessor to the crime, the circuit court is within its discretion to discount the entire edifice. The analysis also serves as a practical reminder that “no blood on clothing” is not a reliable marker of innocence in shooting cases — the probative value of such evidence depends heavily on the weapon, the range, and the nature of the wound.
For post-conviction practitioners, the opinion underscores the importance of securing sworn testimony from the primary hearsay declarants whenever possible and of building a record that explains, in credibility-neutral terms, why such declarants are unavailable. Absent those foundations, courts will scrutinize whether the “consistency” of double-hearsay accounts reflects independent recollection or a coordinated narrative shaped by shared relationships with the petitioner.