Ruling to test Madigan's talk of truth, justice

Eric Zorn, Columnist,
Chicago Tribune June 24, 2003

"Rolando Cruz spent seven years on Death Row despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. But Joe Birkett? He continued to prosecute Cruz using coerced testimony." Lisa Madigan campaign ad, Oct. 8.

"Joe Birkett is asking you to judge his integrity and his leadership on the basis of his past record. It's the record of a prosecutor who has been unencumbered by conscience." Madigan, referring to the Cruz case during a candidate forum, Oct. 1.

"I can promise that as attorney general, I will never cover up the truth and stand in the way of justice." Madigan campaign news release, Sept. 23.

Thanks in part to these sorts of relentless attacks on her opponent's integrity, Democrat Lisa Madigan won November's attorney general's race against Republican DuPage County State's Atty. Joe Birkett.

Now, U.S. District Judge Michael McCuskey has thrown a ruling at Madigan that will put her lofty campaign rhetoric to the test.

Last week, in a sharply worded opinion, McCuskey vacated the conviction of Gordon "Randy" Steidl, who is serving a life sentence for the July 1986 murder of a newlywed couple in downstate Paris.

McCuskey belittled an Illinois Appellate Court ruling upholding the conviction and ordered the state to retry or release Steidl within 120 days. He concluded, "Acquittal was reasonably probable if the jury had heard all of the evidence" that Steidl's defense attorney failed to present at the trials in Edgar County in which he and co-defendant Herbert Whitlock were convicted.

That evidence strongly supports the contention of advocates for Steidl and Whitlock that the two purported eyewitnesses to the crime--a notorious alcoholic and an admitted drug addict whose accounts of seeing Steidl and Whitlock butcher Dyke and Karen Rhoads in their home in the middle of the night are the linchpin of the state's case--simply made up their stories several months after the fact when the police investigation stalled.

The alcoholic, Darrell Herrington, admitted to being stumbling drunk the night of the murders and recanted his story once, but later unrecanted. The drug addict, Debra Rienbolt, said she'd been drinking, smoking pot and popping codeine pills that night and has recanted and unrecanted her story twice.

The "I was lying when I said I was lying" problem notwithstanding, these witness accounts are dubious. Rienbolt was clocked in at work as a nurse's aide in the hours before the murders when she claimed to have seen Steidl and Whitlock in various bars; the knife she claimed was the murder weapon didn't match the wounds on the victims; and the broken lamp she said she'd seen in the victims' bedroom was actually broken later by firefighters putting out a blaze that the killer or killers had set to cover their tracks.

Herrington's account, meanwhile, doesn't square with Rienbolt's or with Steidl's alibi witnesses.

The shabbiness of this evidence rivals the shabbiness of the evidence that DuPage County presented to convict three men, including Rolando Cruz, for the 1983 rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville.

The three have since been exonerated. And while Birkett has voiced support for the original prosecutors and failed to bring charges against the man whom new DNA testing links to the crime, he was not in charge during any of the trials and he played a minor role as an assistant in only one of them. Yet during the campaign, Madigan repeatedly thundered at him for not having done more to set right the scales of justice.

Now, Madigan is in charge and stands poised over those same scales. When her office gets the Steidl case back from the state appellate prosecutor's office next week, she will have to decide whether to appeal McCuskey's ruling or to accept the ruling and send the case back to Edgar County, where prosecutors are almost sure to drop it.

Will she recognize overwhelming evidence of innocence when she sees it? Will she be encumbered by conscience as she reads the shocking record? Will she fulfill her promise never to act to cover up the truth? Or was that just cheap campaign talk?
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McCuskey's ruling is posted at ericzorn.com, where you'll also find my columns on the case dating back to 1998.