Amid a growing furor over the decision to send Gary Dotson back to prison, Cathleen Crowell Webb said Friday that she is willing to be tried for committing perjury at his rape trial if it would help set him free.
Dotson, 28, was back in the Joliet Correctional Center Friday to resume serving his 25- to 50-year sentence for rape.
Officials, including Gov. James Thompson, judges and prosecutors, said they were beseiged by phone calls from the public objecting to Circuit Judge Richard Samuels` decision Thursday to return Dotson to prison.
Warren Lupel, Dotson`s lawyer, said Friday that he would file a petition asking Thompson either to pardon Dotson or terminate his sentence. Either step would free Dotson.
Lupel is attempting to gather thousands of signatures on a petition supporting the appeal to Thompson. He also said he would file a court appeal of Samuels` ruling. Lupel said Friday the faculty of a Chicago law school has offered to help him pursue the case. Other lawyers also have offered assistance, he said.
Dotson, who already has served six years behind bars, has been in custody longer than most offenders who have been convicted of rape in Cook County.
Nic Howell, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections, said that 124 persons who were convicted of rape in Cook County were released from prison in 1983 after serving an average of 4.5 years.
After sending Dotson back to prison, Samuels left on a previously scheduled vacation to Florida. He had a police escort when he left the Markham court building where Thursday`s hearing on the Dotson case took place.
The bizarre case was front-page news in cities throughout the nation as well as a topic of discussion on radio talk shows in several cities. ”A lot of calls got very emotional,” said a spokesman for station KMOX in St. Louis. ”Everybody has his mind made up one way or the other.”
Webb, now 23 and a mother of two who lives in New Hampshire, took the lead in the effort to free Dotson by testifying that he never raped her. On Thursday, Samuels rejected arguments that Dotson was wrongly convicted of rape at a trial in 1979.
In ruling against Dotson, Samuels said he believed the testimony of Webb, then 17, when he presided at Dotson`s rape trial, but did not believe her testimony when she testified on Dotson`s behalf this week.
At the trial in 1979, a jury deliberated only 96 minutes before convicting Dotson. An appeal failed.
In an interview in her attorney`s hotel room in Chicago, Webb said she would continue efforts to free Dotson. Webb also explained some of the apparent gaps in her most recent testimony about events in July, 1977, when the rape allegedly took place.
”I`m going to do everything within the legal boundaries I can to get him free,” she said in offering to stand trial for perjury. ”I`m leaving myself open and free and available to the state`s attorney`s office, the governor and to anyone who can help free him.”
Members of Dotson`s family already have informally asked Thompson to pardon him. The governor warned Friday that he would not be stampeded by public opinion. He said he would ask the Illinois Department of Law Enforcment to make a thorough study of the case to help him make a decision.
Thompson said that in ruling on any petition for clemency he would be guided by the recommendations of the Illinois Prison Review Board and the findings of the state Department of Law Enforcment.
The Cook County state`s attorney`s staff, which fought vigorously against freeing Dotson, was flooded with hostile calls at its Markham office, employees said. A clerk in the office said prosecutors who fought the Dotson case didn`t get a single congratulatory call.
Judge Paul Gerrity, supervising judge in the Markham court branch, said that he and his secretary had ”many” calls complaining of Samuels` decision. ”The public is untrained in the law,” Gerrity said. ”Judge Samuels`
decision is based on the law. From what I can see, most legal experts do not question his decision.”
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But several attorneys said they believed that Dotson was entitled to a new trial to allow another set of jurors to rule on the credibility of Webb`s most recent testimony.
Samuels said in his ruling that the law takes a jaundiced view of recanted testimony. But Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said in a telephone interview: ”To look suspiciously on recanted testimony is simply a way of saying that we will allow injustice to continue.
”The one thing we know for sure is that the main witness against him is capable of telling very convincing lies. The first time she convinced a judge and a jury and a lot of people and the second time she also convinced a great many people.
”It is incontrovertible that she is capable of telling convincing lies, and that alone should result in a new trial where a group of jurors could determine which is a lie and which is the truth.”
Dershowitz and others also criticized the procedure that allowed Samuels, who presided at Dotson`s initial trial, to rule on his motion for release.
”Judges are very covetous of what they`ve done, and it is very rare to find a judge that backs off an earlier finding,” said Edward Genson, a Chicago defense lawyer.
On Friday, Thompson said: ”This is a case full of mysteries and unanswered questions:
”Why the recantation so late? What motive would Webb have to lie a second time? The vagaries of the scientific evidence; and why the alibi evidence was apparently in contradiction, both in this hearing and the previous one.”
Webb responded: ”I feel confident that if I could sit down and talk with him, he would see that I am speaking the truth.” Webb also sought tried answer some of these questions during Friday`s interview.
On why she waited years to come forward: ”I knew it was wrong when I did it, but I was so hard and calloused by it. I didn`t have a good conscience to make me feel guilty.”
She said her conscience began to trouble her after she had a religious conversion in 1981 and joined the Baptist Church. She said that even then she fought the pangs of conscience until this year, when she realized she had to act.
Webb appeared hurt by comments that she ”heard voices” telling her to clear Dotson. She said some may have misunderstood her earlier comment that God told her she had to do the right thing.
”God didn`t speak in audible words,” she said Friday. ”I`ve never heard any realistic voices or anything like that. I really want to make it abundantly clear that I`ve never heard any voices at all. It`s been my conscience that has spoken to me.”
Webb had testified that she cut and bruised her body to make it appear that she had been raped. But in rebuttal, a policewoman and Webb`s foster mother said she not only looked as if she had been raped but acted as if she had been raped. Both said she was terrified and virtually hysterical.
Webb described herself Friday as a ”good actress”:
”My tears were more because I was scared that they were gong to find out my lie. If I was crying that night it was because I was beginning to realize just what I was getting myself into and that I was going to have to keep lying.”