Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online

was false. The officer said he’d discovered he’d actually been in Florida at the time the other cops had supposedly recounted the vision statement to him.
    Judge Ronald Mehling acquitted Rolando, and a few months later the case against Alex was dismissed. In the ensuring uproar, a special grand jury was convened, resulting in the indictment of seven men—three former prosecutors and four members of the DuPage County Sheriff’s police—on various charges, including conspiring to obstruct justice in the Cruz case. They were tried and, as is often the case when law enforcement officers are charged with overzealous execution of their duties, acquitted, although the county subsequently reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in civil suits brought by Hernandez, Cruz, and their one-time co-defendant, Stephen Buckley.
    Accepting that jury’s verdict that none of the seven men acted with criminal intent, I still marvel how little chastening there has been in DuPage County. Joe Birkett, Jim Ryan’s eventual successor as State’s Attorney, celebrated at the victory party for his indicted colleagues the night of their acquittal. He recently admitted that DNA establishes Dugan’s role with “scientific certainty,” but still refuses to acknowledge Cruz and Hernandez’s innocence.
    On the other hand, the judges in the criminal division attempted to strip Ronald Mehling of his position as Presiding Judge, after he acquitted Cruz. While that effort failed in the face of a public outcry, Mehling decided to resign in 2002. When he did, he had to pay for his own retirement party. In the meantime, Robert Kilander, the prosecutor who tried to send Alex Hernandez to death with the print from a woman’s shoe and who was subsequently indicted for conspiring to obstruct justice in the Cruz case, has taken the bench and is now the Chief Judge of DuPage County.

8
THE VICTIMS
    I F THESE ARE THE PERILS , why have a death penalty? What do we get out of it?
    One group that consistently supports executions is the surviving loved ones of murder victims. As an AUSA, I’d handled only one shooting case. Clearly, I didn’t know enough about how the world looks to the victims of violence. As a result, a number of my colleagues and I urged the Commission to hear from the murdered person’s survivors, who are commonly referred to as “the victims.” In murder cases, alone among crimes, the anguish and loss of loved ones stands in for what was experienced by the actual victims, who can no longer speak for themselves.
    In order to sample public opinion about the capital punishment system, the Commission held open hearings in both Chicago and Springfield, the state capital. The roster of speakers was dominated by death penalty opponents, many of them associated with religious groups. (One organization whose position I hadn’t anticipated was the Illinois Medical Society, which objects to state laws allowing physicians to assist in executions, in violation of the Hippocratic oath.) Understandably, survivors were not eager to turn their hearts inside out in that kind of forum, and as a result we scheduled private sessions where they felt freer to speak.
    I learned a great deal in those hours. What made the deepest impression on me was my eventual recognition that losing a loved one to a murder is unlike any other blow delivered in our often-cruel lives. This is because the survivor’s loss is not the result of something as fickle and unfathomable as disease, or as random as a typhoon. Instead, he has had someone ripped from him by the conscious choice of another human being. This is so far from the ingrained assumptions we share in living together that the reality is almost impossible to accommodate. And the unique nature of this loss is a special challenge to the regime of reason and rules that is the law because it exists, first and foremost, to encourage and enforce minimum standards