Rolando Cruz (born 1963) is an American man known for having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, along with co-defendant Alejandro Hernandez, for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County, Illinois. The police had no substantive physical evidence linking the two men to the crime. Their first trial was jointly in 1987, and their statements were used against each other and a third defendant.
After appeals and other court actions, during which they remained in prison on death row, each of these two men was tried twice more. Hernandez was convicted each time and sentenced the last time to life. Cruz was acquitted in 1995 at his third trial after a sheriff's lieutenant recanted previous testimony, and new DNA evidence was introduced excluding Cruz and Hernandez from that found at the crime scene. The state dismissed all charges against Hernandez that same year; he was already serving his sentence in prison. Both men were freed.
In 1996 the state indicted seven DuPage County law enforcement officials for conspiracy to convict Cruz and wrongful prosecution. They were acquitted but Cruz, Hernandez and Steven Buckley (one of the three original defendants) filed a civil suit against DuPage County.
In September 2000, the three men received a settlement from DuPage County for wrongful prosecution and conviction. Cruz was pardoned in 2002 by the Illinois governor after having served more than 12 years in custody on death row.
Another man, Brian Dugan, already convicted of rape and murder of both a child and an adult woman in separate events, had claimed in 1985 to have committed the crime. His DNA was later found to match that from the Nicarico crime scene. Dugan was not indicted until 2005 by a DuPage County grand jury for the crimes against Nicarico, and he pleaded guilty in 2009. He was initially sentenced to death. After Illinois abolished this punishment, his sentence was commuted to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Events
On February 25, 1983, 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico (born July 7, 1972) was abducted in broad daylight from her home in Naperville, Illinois. Suffering from the flu, Jeanine had been at home alone while her parents were at work and her sisters were at school. Her body was found 2 days later, six miles from her home.[1] She had been raped and beaten to death.
Investigation
When Rolando Cruz, a 20-year-old known gang member from Aurora, approached the police with purported information about the murder, to claim the $10,000 reward, he became a person of interest because of his fabrications.[2] Several weeks later, Alejandro Hernandez, a high-school dropout also from Aurora, came forward and said that three people had murdered Jeanine and that he knew two of them, Stephen Buckley and "Ricky". Ricky was never identified. Hernandez himself soon became a suspect.
The police took Buckley's boots (which he was wearing the day of the abduction of the girl) to compare with a print found on the front door of the house, which had been kicked in to gain entry. John Gorajczyk, a shoe print examiner in the DuPage County police crime lab, concluded they did not match but never completed a report about this result. Gorajczyk later said that lead prosecutor and Assistant State's Attorney Thomas Knight told him not to discuss the Buckley print not matching, nor the lack of his report.[3] Knight sent the print and boots to the Illinois State Police crime lab, who also did not find a match. He next sent the boots and prints to an expert in Kansas who concluded there was no match. Finally the prosecution submitted the print and boots to Louise Robbins, an anthropologist in North Carolina said to be an expert on footprints.[4] She testified that Buckley's boots matched the print, and that she could identify the height and race of the wearer by it.[4][5]
Cruz, Hernandez and Buckley were indicted for the abduction, rape and murder of Nicarico on 8 March 1984. After Robbins was discredited in 1986 as an expert witness, the FBI crime lab conducted its own tests. Affirming the reviews by the first three persons above, it concluded that Buckley's boot did not match the print.[5]
There was enormous public and political pressure on the DuPage County State Attorney's office to solve this highly publicized case. The police and prosecutors became convinced of Cruz's guilt. The lead detective, John Sam, resigned in protest before the 1985 trial because he believed that the three men were innocent.[6][7]
Prosecution
In 1987 the three men—Cruz, Alejandro Hernandez, and Stephen Buckley—were charged with Jeanine's rape and murder despite a dearth of physical and forensic evidence.
At the joint trial of the three young men in 1987, two detectives testified that during an interview on May 9, 1983, Cruz had told them that he had had a vision about the Nicarico murder. He allegedly told them that Jeanine's nose had been broken, that she had been hit in the head so hard that a depression was left in the ground where her body was found, that she had been sodomized, and that she had been left in a farmer's field, all details from the crime that had not been made public. Cruz maintained he had never made the statement. There was no police record of it, and it had not been mentioned during the indictment hearing three years earlier.[5]
Cruz and Hernandez were each convicted, but the jury deadlocked on Buckley. The state did not choose to try him again, and the charges against Buckley were dropped on 5 March 1987. Both Cruz and Hernandez were sentenced to death by the jury.
In November 1985, a man named Brian Dugan, unrelated to any of these defendants, was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole for two unrelated rapes and murders (one of a seven-year-old girl and the other of an adult woman) committed in nearby Kane and LaSalle counties. He had pleaded guilty to the crimes to evade the death penalty. While in discussions on the plea deal, Dugan had told his attorney hypothetically that he was solely responsible for the rape and murder of Jeanine Nicarico, in an effort to avoid the death penalty. The prosecution rejected his proposal, as they had not investigated him for this crime. It withheld this information, about another suspect who had confessed, from being introduced at Cruz's trial.
First appeal
The defense appealed the convictions of Cruz and Hernandez. The convictions were overturned on January 19, 1989, due to a prosecutorial error, and remanded to the lower court. The prosecution next tried Cruz and Hernandez separately. The county had accepted Dugan's confession, but rejected his claim of having acted alone. The prosecution maintained that Cruz was the rapist and that he, Dugan, and Hernandez jointly committed the murder.
As in the original trial, the prosecution case rested in part on the likelihood that two shoeprints below a window of the Nicarico home belonged to Hernandez or Cruz. A crime lab technician for the DuPage County Sheriff's office, Paul Sahs, was due to testify to this at their retrials under separate prosecutions. According to Sahs' testimony before the later "DuPage 7" grand jury, he asked the prosecutors to be excused as a witness. Nike officials had told him that the prints were made by a woman's shoe, size 5 1/2 or 6, too small for either Hernandez or Cruz. The prosecutors did not give this information to the defense as required by law. They put Sahs on the stand but did not ask him about shoe size or the sex of the wearer, and the information was not revealed at the trial.[5]
The Illinois Supreme Court upheld Cruz's second conviction and death sentence in February 1990. The Court found that the errors in the trial (which occur at every trial) did not render the trial unfair. Hernandez's second trial ended in a hung jury. When he was tried a third time, the jury found him guilty but sentenced him to life in prison. On May 17, 1991, Hernandez was sentenced to 80 years in prison.
Further appeals and exoneration
Cruz appealed again in December 1992, and his second conviction was again upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court. Assistant State's Attorney General Mary Brigid Kenney, who was assigned to defend against Cruz's appeal, sent a memo to Illinois Attorney GeneralRoland Burris identifying her concern about numerous errors in the investigation and trial in Cruz's initial conviction, including "perjured testimony" and "fraudulent investigations by local officials".[8] Burris disputed Kenney's contentions, claiming he could not hold his judgement higher than the jury and that it was his job to uphold a jury's decision.[9] Kenney resigned in protest, claiming, "I was being asked to help execute an innocent man".[7]
In 1994 Cruz's conviction was overturned on appeal. The county chose to retry the case again. During the third trial, a sheriff's lieutenant who had testified regarding Cruz's "vision" at the first trial recanted his previous testimony. He admitted to having testified under oath and said that Cruz had not made the statement. He also said that DNA tests had excluded Cruz and his co-defendant, Alejandro Hernandez, as the contributors of the semen found at the crime scene. The DNA implicated Brian Dugan, who had already confessed to the crime in 1985.[10]
On November 3, 1995, a DuPage County judge acquitted Cruz on the basis of the recanted testimony, the DNA evidence, and the lack of any substantiated evidence against the defendant. In December 1995, the charges against Hernandez, who had been serving time in prison, were dismissed by the State's Attorney.
Aftermath
Following a grand jury proceeding, the DuPage County State's Attorney office indicted seven DuPage County law enforcement officials, Thomas Knight and two other prosecutors, and four sheriff's deputies, in December 1996 on 47 charges of conspiracy to convict Cruz despite being aware of exculpatory evidence. They were charged with perjury and obstruction of justice.[3]
The indictment rested on two main points. The first was that two detectives had testified that Cruz had told them that he had had a "vision" of the murder that contained details known only to the killer. This material was never recorded or included in any police report but was "endorsed and perpetuated by the prosecutors." Secondly, they said prosecutors had concealed Brian Dugan's confession while knowing that it included accurate, private details related to the crimes, which indicated that he had committed the deeds.[5] In April 1999, the trial of the "DuPage Seven" began. In June 1999 each of the seven officials was declared acquitted by Judge William Kelly.[3]
According to the Chicago Tribune in 2007, the case against the DuPage law enforcement officials established a legal benchmark in getting to trial, as it is highly unusual for prosecutors to be prosecuted for their actions in office. Since 1966 there had been 381 homicide convictions in the United States reversed on the grounds that prosecutors knowingly used false evidence or withheld evidence suggesting innocence. Of these, 46 were tried in Illinois, which had the second-highest total and twice as many as the state that ranked third. Only two of those cases resulted in later indictments of prosecutors, and both were dismissed before trial.[5][11]
In 2000, Cruz, Hernandez, and Buckley received a settlement from DuPage County for their wrongful convictions. In 2002 Cruz was fully pardoned by Governor George Ryan.[12]
In November 2005, Dugan was indicted for the Nicarico murder.[13][14] On July 28, 2009, 52-year-old Dugan pleaded guilty. His 1985 confession was made public for the first time on October 14.[15]
On October 7, 2009, the jury determined Dugan was eligible for the death penalty, which under state law required that he qualify by at least one of four conditions: that the victim was younger than 12, the crime was exceptionally brutal and heinous, a previous conviction for at least one other murder, or that the crime was committed during the course of another felony. He qualified on all four counts.[16]
The public outcry from the Cruz case resulted in Governor George Ryan declaring a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, asserting that the system was "fraught with error."[14]
On March 9, 2011, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois, making it law.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Darryl Hunt was an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in 1984, was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the rape and the murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white newspaper copy editor. After being convicted in that case, Hunt was tried in 1987 for the 1983 murder of Arthur Wilson, a 57-year-old black man of Winston-Salem. Both convictions were overturned on appeal in 1989. Hunt was tried again in the Wilson case in 1990; he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He was tried again on the Sykes charges in 1991; he was convicted.
Anthony Porter was a Chicago resident known for having been exonerated in 1999 of the murder in 1982 of two teenagers on the South Side of the city. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983, and served 17 years on death row. He was exonerated following introduction of new evidence by Northwestern University professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism as part of their investigation for the school's Innocence Project. Porter's appeals had been repeatedly rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, and he was once 50 hours away from execution.
James Alan Gell is an American who was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder in 1998 and sentenced to death in Bertie County, North Carolina, at the age of 22. He served nine years as an inmate on death row before being acquitted in a second trial in 2004; he was freed from prison and exonerated that year. He was the 113th person to be freed from death row in the United States.
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town is a 2006 true crime book by John Grisham, his only nonfiction title as of 2020. The book tells the story of Ronald 'Ron' Keith Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, a former minor league baseball player who was wrongly convicted in 1988 of the rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada and was sentenced to death. After serving 11 years on death row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence and other material introduced by the Innocence Project and was released in 1999.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.
The Jeanine Nicarico murder case was a complex and influential homicide investigation and prosecution in which two men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, both Latinos, were wrongfully convicted of abduction, rape and murder in 1985 in DuPage County, Illinois. They were both sentenced to death. The case was scrutinized during appeals for being weak in evidence.
Brian James Dugan is a convicted rapist and serial killer active between 1983 and 1985 in Chicago's western suburbs. He was known for having informally confessed in 1985 to the February 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville, Illinois, which was a highly publicized case. He was already in custody for two other rapes and murders, one of a woman in July 1984 and the other an 8-year-old girl in May 1985. He was sentenced to life after pleading guilty to the latter two crimes.
The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides: "[N]or shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb..." The four essential protections included are prohibitions against, for the same offense:
Walter "Johnny D." McMillian was a pulpwood worker from Monroeville, Alabama, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His conviction was wrongfully obtained, based on police coercion and perjury. In the 1988 trial, under a controversial Alabama doctrine called "judicial override", the judge imposed the death penalty, although the jury had voted for a sentence of life imprisonment.
Delbert Lee Tibbs was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 in Florida and sentenced to death. Later exonerated, Tibbs became a writer and anti-death penalty activist.
Odin Leonardo John Lloyd was a semi-professional American football player who was murdered by Aaron Hernandez, a former tight end for the New England Patriots of the National Football League, in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, on June 17, 2013. Lloyd's death made international headlines following Hernandez's association with the investigation as a suspect. Lloyd had been a linebacker for a New England Football League (NEFL) semi-professional football team, the Boston Bandits, since 2007.
The Illinois Innocence Project, a member of the national Innocence Project network, is a non-profit legal organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
Investigating Innocence is a nonprofit wrongful conviction advocacy organization that provides criminal defense investigations for inmates in the United States. Investigating Innocence was founded in 2013 by private investigator Bill Clutter to assist nationwide Innocence Project groups in investigating innocence claims. "Once we have a case that meets our criteria, we'll put private investigators to work on it. A lot of these cases need investigators," said Kelly Thompson, executive director of Investigating Innocence. Prior to his work on Investigating Innocence, Clutter was one of the founders of the Illinois Innocence Project. Investigating Innocence also has a board composed of exonerees that reviews incoming cases.
Juan A. Rivera Jr. is an American man who was wrongfully convicted three times for the 1992 rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Illinois. He was convicted twice on the basis of a confession that he said was coerced. No physical evidence linked him to the crime scene. In 2015 he received a $20 million settlement from Lake County, Illinois for wrongful conviction, formerly the largest settlement of its kind in United States history.
Brian Keith Baldwin was an African-American man from Charlotte, North Carolina, United States of America, who was executed in 1999 in Alabama. Many believe that he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced for the 1977 murder of a young white woman in Monroe County of that state. The only evidence against Baldwin in the murder was his own confession, which he later retracted. He said that it was coerced by the local police in Wilcox County, Alabama, where he was arrested; they beat and tortured him under interrogation. A 1985 letter by his co-defendant Edward Dean Horsley surfaced in 1996, after Horsley had been executed for first-degree murder in the case. He wrote that he had acted alone in the rape and murder of Naomi Rolon, and that Baldwin had not known of her death.
The Ford Heights Four were formerly imprisoned convicts, who were falsely accused and convicted of the double murder of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal in Ford Heights, Illinois, and later exonerated. Jimerson and Williams were sentenced to death, Adams to 75 years in prison and Rainge to life. Following the murder in 1978, the four spent almost two decades in prison before being released in 1996. This miscarriage of justice was due to false forensic testimony, coercion of a prosecution witness, perjury by another witness who had an incentive to lie, and prosecution and police misconduct. The DNA evidence uncovered in the investigation to clear their names eventually led to the arrest and conviction of the real killers.
Bill Clutter is an American private investigator, wrongful conviction advocate, and author. He is the co-founder of the Illinois Innocence Project and founder of the national wrongful conviction organization Investigating Innocence. His work on the Donaldson v. Central Illinois Public Service Company case led him to write the book Coal Tar: How Corrupt Politics and Corporate Greed Are Killing America's Children, which is the story of an epidemic of neuroblastoma in Taylorville, IL caused by exposure to coal tar.
George Whitmore Jr. was an African American man who was charged but later cleared of the infamous Career Girls Murders of 1963. "The Supreme Court cited Mr. Whitmore’s case as 'the most conspicuous example' of police coercion when it issued its 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, establishing a set of protections for suspects, like the right to remain silent."
1 2 Siegel, Barry (1 November 1992). "Presumed Guilty: An Illinois Murder Case Became a Test of Conscience Inside the System". Los Angeles Times. p.18.
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