Case that transformed death penalty debate back in court

CHICAGO -- A 10-year-old girl by the name of Jeanine Nicarico helped to transform the debate over the death penalty in America.

In 1983, Jeanine was kidnapped from her home outside Chicago, raped and murdered. During the two decades that followed, two men were tried amid allegations that sheriff's deputies and prosecutors concealed and fabricated evidence and put lying jailhouse snitches on the stand.

Ultimately, Rolando Cruz was acquitted at his third trial in 1995, and the charges against Alejandro Hernandez were dropped the same year after his conviction was overturned for the second time.

The furor over the case set in motion a chain of events: It led to other investigations in Illinois that freed prisoners wrongfully convicted of murder. It played a key role in then-Gov. George Ryan's decision to suspend all executions and clear out the state's death row in 2003 of all 167 inmates.

And it helped change the terms of the death penalty debate in the United States. Instead of arguing over the morality of capital punishment or whether it deters crime, politicians and activists found themselves questioning the reliability of the criminal justice system and contemplating the risk that an innocent person might be put to death.

"This case helped break the myth that the system is infallible," said Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Rob Warden, director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, said: "I do not believe any of this would have happened without the Cruz case."

Both sides of the death penalty debate were reminded of that this week when 49-year-old Brian Dugan, who implicated himself in the crime a full decade ago, was finally charged in Jeanine's slaying. Dugan is already serving two life sentences for the murder of a little girl and a woman.

"The thing that is so important here is that if [prosecutors] had had their way, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez would be dead today," Warden said.

The case against the two men had more twists than a Scott Turow novel. They were originally found guilty and sentenced to death, but one conviction after another was thrown out by the state Supreme Court.

The case came roaring back in 1996 when former prosecutors and DuPage County sheriff's officers were charged with lying and concealing evidence. They were later acquitted.

The furor played a major role in Ryan's decision to assemble a Commission on Capital Punishment in 2000 to determine what was wrong with the state's death penalty system, which had wrongfully convicted 13 men since Illinois reinstated capital punishment in the 1970s.

Ultimately, Ryan concluded that the system was "haunted by the demon of error" and that the risk was too high that an innocent person might be executed.

Also, the Jeanine Nicarico murder was "sort of the really big case that drove the media to look at others" around the country, said Illinois defense attorney Theodore Gottfried, a commission member.

Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago, said the case was instrumental in changing the discussion of the death penalty.

"The unraveling of the case was so dramatic and so fraught with problems that I think that in Illinois the case began to focus attention away from the topics that had dominated the death penalty debate and toward the question of innocence and systemic error and wrongful convictions," he said.

The commission made two major recommendations that were prompted in part by the Jeanine Nicarico case, urging that interrogations of murder suspects be recorded and that a judge determine the reliability of jailhouse informants before they testify. Both of those were adopted by the Legislature.

In the past few years, the state has also given the Illinois Supreme Court greater power to throw out unjust verdicts, offered defendants more access to evidence and barred the death penalty in cases that depend on a single witness.

Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich has kept the moratorium on executions in place while he sees how the changes work.