Former child-care worker Jennifer Del Prete spent nine years in prison, after being wrongfully convicted of shaking a 4-month-old girl she was caring for in a Romeoville daycare. The child died 10 months later, and Ms. Del Prete was convicted of first-degree murder in 2005 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, leaving behind her own two minor children.
In 2016, Ms. Del Prete was released from custody, but she faced the prospect of being retried for another six years. Finally, in October 2022, just weeks before her retrial on murder charges, Will County State’s Attorney’s Office decided to drop its prosecution of Ms. Del Prete and the court dismissed the charges against her.
Ms. Del Prete has been fighting to prove her innocence for more than two decades, including post-conviction proceedings in state and federal court. In that time, numerous medical experts have debunked the State’s shaken-baby theory, and presented evidence that the child had a pre-existing medical condition—namely an old brain bleed—that likely led to the child’s collapse while in Ms. Del Prete’s care.
In addition, a critical piece of exculpatory evidence was never turned over to Ms. Del Prete until 2013, when a FOIA request by journalism students from the Medill Justice Project uncovered a secret communication between the State’s key witness and the lead investigator on the shaken baby diagnosis. That communication revealed that the pathologist conducting the child’s autopsy questioned the shaken baby diagnosis, and would want to see the child’s full medical records to understand how the State’s expert reached her diagnosis. Instead, the pathologist received only the State expert’s report that summarized the medical records and did not disclose that the child had an old brain bleed.
Once that communication was disclosed, the original pathologist testified in the federal post-conviction hearing that, had he been aware of the child’s pre-existing brain bleed, he never would have reached the conclusion that the cause of death was abusive head trauma or caused by someone else.
After this long journey, Ms. Del Prete’s 20-year nightmare came to an end on November 18, as Judge Carmen Julia Goodman, in the Circuit Court of the Twelfth Circuit in Joliet, granted Ms. Del Prete an official Certificate of Innocence, which will remove the conviction from her record and declare her officially innocent of the charges.
At the hearing, Ms. Del Prete was represented by attorneys Heather Lewis Donnell of Loevy + Loevy, and Patrick Blegen of Blegen & Associates.
Click here for copies of Ms. Del Prete’s Certificate of Innocence petition, the State’s response, Ms. Del Prete’s reply, and her Certificate of Innocence.
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