Illinois began its controversial death penalty review Tuesday with defense lawyers arguing their clients were condemned by a flawed system, angry prosecutors demanding justice, and the families of victims tearfully asking that inmates convicted of murdering their loved ones finally be put to death.
“I’m pleading for justice for Ricky,” Donald Pedro, whose son Riccardo was murdered in 1984, told a panel of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board hearing the clemency cases. “Not for me. Not for his mama. Not for a bunch of causes.”
On the first of nine days of hearings in Chicago and Springfield for nearly all the 160 prisoners on Death Row, the Illinois death penalty’s troubled past and its uncertain future were again the focus of the debate, as they have been since Gov. George Ryan called a moratorium on executions nearly three years ago.
Defense attorneys portrayed the hearings as the closing chapter of a long struggle over capital punishment, while a Downstate prosecutor called the reviews “a profound insult to the administration of justice.”
In some hearings, victims’ families said an execution was the only way they would achieve emotional peace. In other cases, mothers of inmates pleaded for mercy and asked their sentences to be commuted to life in prison without parole.
Ryan has said he is considering several options, from issuing a blanket commutation to every Death Row inmate to selecting cases based on what he has pledged will be a thorough review by his attorneys and staff members and the Prisoner Review Board’s recommendations.
Those recommendations, expected to go to the outgoing governor next month, are non-binding and confidential.
There were 23 hearings at four locations Tuesday and they often grew heated. Defense attorneys and prosecutors sparred over whether inmates should be spared because their trials had been held before any of the reforms proposed by a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Ryan. They revisited unresolved allegations of torture by former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives.
And they argued over evidence from trials that in some instances occurred decades ago and over evidence that had been unearthed only recently.
They quarreled over other issues as well, from jailhouse informants and questionable eyewitness testimony to the quality of defense lawyers, allegations of prosecution misconduct and whether some inmates are mentally retarded.
The only issue on which both sides–as well as the Prisoner Review Board members hearing the cases–could agree was that it was unfortunate the victims’ families had to revisit what one board member called the “unwarranted carnage exacted in their lives.”
The day was a sad parade of victims’ families, some of them wearing yellow ribbons in memory of their loved ones, saying they could hardly bear to again hear gruesome details of the cases.
“I see the blood of my nephews on my hands every day, and it’s not getting better,” said Estella Jennings, who is the aunt of three victims of Sherrell Towns and who cleaned blood from the floor of the trailer where the 1993 St. Louis-area murders occurred.
Defense attorneys and advocates for Death Row inmates sought to focus the hearings on the issues that Ryan’s commission identified in a report as needing reform. Even before the hearings, they had told other attorneys to highlight how their clients’ trials had been deficient in the petitions they filed.
But the board signaled early that it may not be receptive to such claims, with chairwoman Anne Taylor telling a defense attorney the recommendations “are not the law,” and “to base the majority of your argument on these recommendations doesn’t seem appropriate.”
Defense attorneys used charts to illustrate their cases and offered testimony from some of the nation’s leading experts on false confessions, how trials should be conducted and other crucial matters.
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During a hearing for Leroy Orange, convicted of murdering four people on the South Side in 1984, attorneys used enlargements of newspaper articles and hospital records to try to illustrate problems with the case.
Orange, his attorneys said, maintains he is innocent. Orange also contends that his claims of police torture have never been heard. “This board and the governor are really Mr. Orange’s last chance,” said one of his attorneys, Cathryn Crawford.
Prosecutors, however, said there was no evidence of Orange’s innocence or of his torture claim, and they mocked defense attorneys’ efforts to use the widespread torture charges to undermine the case.
“This is not a referendum on the death penalty,” said Assistant Cook County State’s Atty. David O’Connor, his voice rising. “This is about taking every case individually and reviewing them individually.”
Although prosecutors and victims’ families had complained before the hearings that they might not get the time they needed to make their presentations, several of the hearings ran close to two hours. No one appeared to have been cut short.
Many cases heard Tuesday were among the worst crimes in Illinois in the past three decades.
Attorneys for Henry Brisbon acknowledged the so-called I-57 killer might be the most unlikely candidate to have his death sentence commuted to life in prison without parole. Brisbon was convicted of using a shotgun to murder a young couple in the summer of 1973 after he and others robbed at least four travelers and killed three of them.
Brisbon forced Dorothy Cerney and James Schmidt to share a “last kiss” before shooting them in the back, prosecutors said. He was convicted in 1978, but he was not eligible for the death penalty for the murders.
He was later convicted of murdering a fellow inmate at Stateville Correctional Center and sentenced to death.
State Sen. Edward Petka (R-Plainfield) was the Will County state’s attorney at Brisbon’s trials. He testified Tuesday, saying that at trial he argued “Henry Brisbon was a walking, talking testimony for why we needed the death penalty.”
But defense lawyers said there are unanswered questions about whether Brisbon was involved in the prison killing.
“What he did to [Cerney and Schmidt] is unspeakable,” lawyer Jean Snyder said at the hearing. “But he was not sentenced to death for that crime. The killing at Stateville can’t be used as a surrogate for that.”
In Springfield, Frieda Britz asked the board to spare her son, Dewayne Britz, who was convicted of killing a woman who stopped to help him after his pickup truck broke down. Britz’s attorney argued his client has a low IQ.
“I do love my son,” she said after the hearing. “I’ll never stop loving him no matter what. No one would know what this is like until they walked in my shoes.”
Though most attorneys sought a commutation to life in prison, and a few argued their clients were innocent and should be pardoned and set free, at least one asked for a reduced sentence. In the case of Mario Flores, a former high school diving champion who was convicted of killing Gilbert Perez in 1984 in a gang dispute, attorneys asked for a 40-year sentence.
His lawyers argued Flores, who took up painting in prison, had qualities that made his life worth redeeming. Before and after the hearing, Flores’ parents displayed some of his artwork, including a self-portrait in a blue denim penitentiary shirt.
Attorneys for Renaldo Hudson argued he had turned his life full circle, and therefore deserved life. The defense presentation brought an angry, yet controlled response from Assistant Cook County State’s Atty. Christine Cook.
“I can give you 60 reasons why this petitioner should be kept in jail and then executed,” she said, showing an enlarged photograph of 72-year-old Folke Petersen’s bloodied body, stabbed more than 60 times over eight hours in 1983.
The family members of Dean and Jo Ellen Pueschel, slain in their West Ridge home in 1983, packed a hearing room at the State of Illinois Building. Several of them spoke, including Richard Dean Pueschel, the couple’s son who as an 11-year-old survived the attack. He recalled the horror of the crime for which brothers Reginald and Jerry Mahaffey were convicted.
“I remember those faces,” he said with barely contained fury.
But the brothers’ attorneys and expert witnesses highlighted what they called flaws in the brothers’ convictions, including allegations of torture by Chicago police. They also said other Death Row inmates who had once seemed unquestionably guilty were later exonerated.
“Prosecutors showed confidence today, but it’s the same confidence they showed” in the cases of inmates later exonerated, said Lawrence C. Marshall of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Conviction. “When is the law-enforcement community going to start to be humbled by its experience here?”
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