Cecil Sutherland After spending more than a decade on Illinois' Death Row, Cecil Sutherland has been reconvicted of the 1987 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Amy Schulz of Kell, IL. In a surprising decision, shortly after the sentencing phase of his case began, Sutherland voluntarily asked to be returned to Death Row. Sutherland was again convicted and sentenced to death on evidence of two pubic hairs found on the girl's body, his dog's hair, fibers from clothing and a tire track. However, there were no fingerprints, eyewitnesses, or a confession to connect him to the crime. Bad timing is to primarily blame for the 46-year-old becoming the sixth man to receive the death penalty, and the second man to return to death row, since former Governor Ryan's commutations. In 2000, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Sutherland's conviction and granted him a new trial. Nearly three years later, Ryan granted clemency to 167 death row inmates, yet because Sutherland's new trial was still pending, his sentence was not commuted to life in prison. "You have a guy on death row and you win a new trial and chance at freedom, who's not going to try to do that," said Sutherland's lawyer John Paul Carroll. "How is anyone going to know that the Illinois governor was going to pardon everyone?" Sutherland's request for the death penalty means that his appeal will move more quickly, bypassing the Illinois Appellate Court and going straight to the Illinois Supreme Court. ©2004 Illinois Coalition to Abolish The Death Penalty |
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