Date: Sunday, August 10, 1997
Source: By David Protess and Rob Warden. David Protess and Rob Warden are
writing a book about the Ford Heights Four, who were freed last year after
serving 65 years for a crime they did not commit.
Section: SUNDAY MAGAZINE
Parts: 20
Memo: For more information on the cases detailed here, see www.ninelives.com.
Copyright Chicago Tribune
NINE LIVES
THE JUSTICE SYSTEM SENTENCED THESE MEN TO DEATH. THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
ULTIMATELY SET THEM FREE. IS THAT JUSTICE?
They were sentenced to death but now they are free--nine men whose lives
were transformed forever by errors in the Illinois criminal justice system.
All were convicted of murders after the state legislature reinstated the
death penalty in 1977. And all of their cases involved flawed police
investigations, questionable conduct by prosecutors and inadequate legal
representation.
Collectively, the nine spent a lifetime behind bars: 52 years on Death
Row, plus 36 years in county jails and state prisons awaiting trials,
appeals, retrials and final disposition of their cases.
That they were not executed has been cited by death penalty proponents as
evidence that the criminal justice system works, a contention the men
themselves dispute. "If I'd depended on the system to correct itself, I'd
have been dead a long time ago," says Dennis Williams, who was sentenced to
death in 1978 for a crime he and three others were cleared of last year. "It
was the work of journalists and volunteer lawyers that forced the system to
admit the mistake that cost 18 years of my life."
Like the overwhelming majority of the Illinois Death Row population,
Williams and his co-defendants were indigent and did not have access to legal
and investigative resources that could have established their innocence long
ago.
Six of the nine exonerated men, including Williams, are people of color
who were sentenced to death for interracial murders; rape was an aggravating
factor in four of their cases. "These types of crimes inflame public
passions, pressuring the authorities to get a conviction and death sentence,"
says Locke E. Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the
University of Chicago Law School. "They produce an atmosphere in which
terrible mistakes can be made."
In the last three years, Illinois has led the nation in acknowledging
mistakes in capital cases. But Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the
Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., points out that this
does not necessarily mean that Illinois courts are more diligent than those
of other states.
"It appears that Illinois simply has a vigilant public interest community
ready to investigate injustices," Dieter says. "If Mississippi had the same
resources, they'd find just as many innocent people on Death Row."
Indeed, all but one of the nine Illinois men were released after persons
outside the system developed evidence of their innocence--witness
recantations, confessions of the actual culprits and scientific evidence. DNA
testing, which prosecutors resisted, led to exoneration of four of the nine.
The case of a 10th Death Row prisoner, Ronald Jones, was reopened last
month after DNA tests indicated he was innocent. But prosecutors, who
initially resisted the testing, are still unwilling to abandon the case.
(details of individual cases deleted); For full information on the nine,
click here.
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