Appeals court tosses conviction in controversial '92 murder case

Appeals court tosses conviction in controversial '92 murder case


Ruling criticizes police, prosecutors in Lake County

By Steve Mills and Cynthia Dizikes, Chicago Tribune reporters
4:35 PM CST, December 11, 2011

In taking the rare step of throwing out Juan Rivera's murder conviction and barring prosecutors from taking him to trial again, the Illinois Appellate Court delivered a withering condemnation to a Lake County criminal justice system already under fire for its handling of high-profile cases.

In a 24-page ruling, the appeals court corrected what it considered a grave injustice in the controversial case of Rivera, who, at three contentious jury trials during the past two decades, was convicted and given life sentences for the 1992 sexual assault and stabbing murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker.

The court said it sympathized with the Staker family, which "suffered unspeakable anguish and frustration" from the crime and the nearly two decades of often painful legal proceedings. But, the court said its chief duty was to review the case dispassionately and render its ruling fairly. In doing so, it made the point of saying that it viewed Rivera, his family and friends as equally affected by the crime.

"Mr. Rivera, too, has suffered the nightmare of wrongful incarceration," the court concluded in its opinion, released Friday evening.

That Rivera's nearly 20-year incarceration came at the hands of a persistent Lake County state's attorney's office likely will add to the growing criticism of the office for its prosecution of cases in which DNA excludes their suspect, as it did in Rivera's case.

In at least two other cases, one of them a death penalty case and all of them documented by the Tribune over the years, Lake County prosecutors stretched credulity in seeking to blunt DNA evidence.

In the Rivera case and in the case in which they sought the death penalty, they insisted that a disputed confession was more reliable. That suggested to many attorneys and other close observers of the Lake County system that the prosecutors there had failed to learn about the frailties of confessions, highlighted in cases across the country by DNA evidence that proved those confessions false.

"This is just one of the very highly problematic cases that have been prosecuted in defiance of common sense and overwhelming physical evidence, especially DNA evidence," Rob Warden, executive director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, which represents Rivera, said after the ruling was issued. "The people of Lake County need to wake up to what their prosecutors are doing."

The law firm of Jenner & Block, which said it donated more than 12,000 hours of legal work to Rivera's trial and appeal, on Saturday called the ruling a "tremendous victory for Mr. Rivera and a great day for justice in the state of Illinois."

The ruling was also hailed by Lawrence Marshall, a founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and the attorney who argued the appeal before the court. Marshall is now is an associate dean at Stanford University law school.

Lake County State's Attorney Michael Waller, who has announced that he not running for re-election next year, said Saturday that he had read the ruling but wanted to study it in more detail over the weekend. He said he planned to meet with his staff Monday to "make a decision on a course of action."

The ruling is sure to be seen as another embarrassment for Waller's team and one that will color his legacy as he leaves office. Just last week, Waller announced that Michael Mermel, a top deputy who had shepherded the Rivera case through the courts and led the trial team at Rivera's last trial, would retire in January after he was criticized for comments about the Rivera case and other cases involving DNA that were seen as callous and intemperate.

Mermel declined to comment.

In its ruling, the court upbraided authorities for their investigation into Holly's murder and especially for how the detectives obtained a confession from Rivera, saying veteran officers used leading questions and likely fed Rivera information about the crime. The court also said detectives psychologically manipulated the fragile Rivera, who was banging his head against a wall and pulling his hair out at one point during the four-day police interrogation.

The appeals court was severely critical of the state's attorney's office. Using unusually harsh language, the appeals court said that the theories the prosecutors offered at trial were "highly improbable" and "distort to an absurd degree" the testimony from witnesses. The court said the evidence against Rivera was "insufficient" to establish his guilt and that his conviction was "unjustified and cannot stand." With that ruling, the court did not even address six other issues raised in the Rivera appeal.

Prosecutors can ask the appeals court to reconsider its decision or the Illinois attorney general's office can appeal the case to the Illinois Supreme Court. But the appeals court saddled them with a heavy burden, writing that even when the evidence was viewed in a light most favorable to the prosecutors, "no rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt."

Although the court wrote that, contrary to the claims of Rivera's attorneys, "DNA does not trump all other evidence," in the end the court determined the DNA "embedded reasonable doubt deep into the State's theory" of the crime.

With that, the Rivera case joins a number of other high-profile Illinois cases upended by DNA, and raises renewed questions about prosecutors' unwillingness to sometimes accept its significance.

Last year, Waller's office was forced to abandon its rape and murder case against Jerry Hobbs, who had been charged with the 2005 stabbing deaths of his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend in Zion. As in Rivera's case, DNA evidence from semen found in the girl's body was not from the suspect, and he confessed after a grueling interrogation. Still, prosecutors pressed on with their case, and even were seeking the death penalty, arguing that it was possible the DNA came from semen left by people frequenting a lover's lane. Prosecutors released Hobbs only after the DNA was matched to another man whose genetic profile was in a database of offenders.

In Cook County, two separate rape and murder cases involving a total of nine men who went to prison as teenagers have unraveled in the past two months because of DNA that undermined confessions. In both of those cases, the DNA evidence did not identify a suspect at trial, but did years later during appeals. In one case in Dixmoor, the DNA was matched earlier this year to a convicted rapist; in the other, in Englewood, it matched earlier this year to a convicted murderer.

At trial and in his public comments, Mermel downplayed the importance of the DNA, particularly when compared with Rivera's confession. The prosecutor suggested at trial that Staker was sexually active, a suggestion the court found unsupported by the evidence.

Rivera, now 39, was in custody on a burglary charge when he became a suspect in the murder of Staker, who was raped and stabbed to death in a Waukegan home where she was baby-sitting. The Lake County man insisted he was innocent and was on a home-monitoring system when the crime occurred. Rivera's lawyers argued that was evidence of his innocence; prosecutors presented evidence the system often failed to detect when subjects left their home.

Rivera was first found guilty in November 1993, but the appellate court reversed the conviction and granted him a new trial. Rivera was convicted again in 1998. In 2004, a Lake County judge granted Rivera DNA testing and a new trial; he was tried again in 2009 and convicted again.

He was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Jed Stone, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Lake County and a longtime observer of Waller and his office, said he hoped the ruling would encourage prosecutors to assess how they view DNA but also realize "they are not about convictions, they are about doing justice."

"And that," he added, "means looking at all of the evidence and remembering that people who are accused of crimes are not others, they are us."

Holly Staker's twin sister, Heather, now 30, still lives in Waukegan. She is the mother of two, has a tattoo of her sister on her neck and she and her mother still hang her sister's Christmas stocking each year. She and Holly were going to start middle school the summer Holly was killed, and the various twists in Rivera's case have been a source of pain for the Staker family. Over the decades, Heather Staker and her mother have remained certain Rivera is the killer, a belief that was not shaken by the court's ruling Friday.

"Maybe there's no physical evidence," she said. "There's enough evidence that came out of this. I'm completely convinced he did it. He knew everything that only the killer could know. Three juries were not wrong, and now they're going to let a killer go loose? How is this justice?"

Juan Rivera's wife of 12 years, Melissa Sanders-Rivera, said she talked to her husband Saturday and he was subdued.

"He's at peace," she said. "He was clear-minded."

"Finally, Lake County will be held accountable," she said. "Lake County -- the great DNA deniers. How many more cases are out there that aren't getting the attention that we got?"

But even before worrying about holding someone accountable for putting him away, Juan Rivera wants to find out who killed Holly Staker, Sanders-Rivera said.

"Somebody has to find out who did this," she said. "Even with him coming home, where's the justice? Lake County just stood back and let the person who did this get away with it for all of these years." Tribune reporter Andy Grimm and freelance reporter Ruth Fuller contributed.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-rivera-conviction-reversed-1211-20111211,0,3644567.story

Editor's note:  This Shark has been informed that much of the blame for an innocent man's incarceration was due to the sloppy and incompetent handling of the case by the Lake County Coroner's Office, led at that time by Coroner Barbara Richardson.  Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster,  ProbateSharks.com