Never too late to learn from pile of mistakes
By Eric Zorn, Columnist, Chicago Tribune
August 23, 2003

My main complaint about the comprehensive, dispassionate and skeptical analysis of virtually every aspect of the controversial Ford Heights Four case issued this week by special prosecutor Gino DiVito is that it arrived about, oh, 25 years too late.

DiVito did what police and prosecutors should have done in the first place: subjected virtually every piece of evidence and every scrap of testimony related to a 1978 double-murder in the south suburbs to scrutiny, weighed all the various possible implications and refused to accept the conclusions of others

He found that while authorities erred, obviously, in their investigation of the crime and in prosecuting and re-prosecuting four men everyone now agrees were wholly innocent, nothing in these errors amounted to proof beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal conduct or intent.

At most points in the 93,000-word main section of the report, DiVito, a former Appellate Court justice and prosecutor, takes seriously the presumption of innocence when it comes to the lawmen.

One example: Yes, it's possible that one or more officers gave information about the crime to a key witness against the falsely accused men, a witness who at various points testified to details we much later learned she had no way of knowing, and who has since said that officers told her what to say.

But, DiVito noted, her story has changed many times over the years, and it's also possible that she picked up those details from other people in the community. And even if she did glean details from officers, we can't be sure which ones, how it happened or if the officers had ill motives.

Fair enough.

DiVito's painstaking look at the facts and circumstances led him to conclude that four men were wrongly sent to prison--two to Death Row--because of a chain of honest errors, mistaken judgments and other human failings, such as "tunnel vision."
My look at his report leads me to suspect it was worse than that. I suppose it's possible that authorities can act with the best of intentions at every step and still perpetrate one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice in Illinois history, but, somehow, I doubt it.

Yet I don't doubt DiVito's conclusion in which he finds no grounds to prosecute investigators or former state's attorneys on the case.

The majesty of our justice system, when it's working right, is the separation it preserves between supposition and certainty; between guesswork and guilt; between good questions and solid answers.

Those of us who criticize the system when it confuses these categories can hardly be disappointed here, where DiVito has taken so seriously, so literally, his duty to separate them.

Nor can we be disappointed by the supplementary remarks Thursday of Cook County State's Atty. Richard Devine, who offered a number of sober, regretful and determined thoughts:

"Had law enforcement done its work better, a great injustice could have been prevented," he said. "That Justice DiVito has concluded these failures do not warrant criminal prosecution is of small comfort. That is hardly the standard police and prosecutors can measure themselves by."

Devine made note of a number of subsequent reforms that would make it impossible for a repeat of the Ford Heights Four debacle and promised to conduct a DiVito-like "fresh review of any case involving a claim of innocence that is to be retried....

"The Ford Heights case has taught us some painful lessons," he said. And, as if to pre-empt those of us about ready to offer a sarcastic quip, added, "Whether we have learned from those lessons will be determined not by our words, but by the actions we have taken and will take in the future."

His tone and demeanor struck a sharp contrast to the end-zone dances performed in 1999 by prosecutors in DuPage County when their office was found not guilty of criminal conduct in the horribly botched Jeanine Nicarico murder case.
Devine all but acknowledged that the fit response to DiVito's report of events so long ago is not "at last!" but "if only . . . "