A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post discussing the pending case of People v. Rivera, in the Illinois Appellate Court. This case involved a horrible rape-murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker, committed in 1992. Juan Rivera confessed, but his confession made no sense and didn’t fit the facts. (For one thing, he stated in the confession that he stabbed her repeatedly after she attacked him because she was mad that he wouldn’t have sex with her.) He appealed, and his conviction was overturned. He was tried again, and convicted again. He appealed again, and his conviction was overturned again. When the case went back for a third trial in 2009, there was new DNA evidence that showed that someone else was the contributor of the sperm. The prosecution argued that this didn’t prove that Juan Rivera was innocent — only that this 11-year-old girl must have been having consensual sex with some unidentified person. (There was no evidence that she had been sexually active, and her twin sister said that she would have known if her twin had been sexually active.) This argument is what we in the defense bar call the “unindicted co-ejaculator” argument.
Now comes the news — from the Chicago Tribune — that Juan Rivera’s conviction has been overturned a third time, and this time with an order that he not be subjected to a fourth trial. The Illinois Appellate Court was unusually harsh in its treatment of the prosecutor. The ruling is not yet posted to the Illinois Appellate Court’s website, but is available at the website of the Northwestern University Center for Wrongful Convictions, here. To quote the Tribune article:
The court upbraided police for their investigation into Staker’s murder and especially for how they obtained a confession from Rivera, saying veteran detectives used leading questions and likely fed Rivera information. The court also said detectives psychologically manipulated the fragile Rivera.
The appeals court was equally if not more critical of the Lake County state’s attorney’s office. Using unusually harsh language, the court said the theories that prosecutors offered at trial were “highly improbable” and “distort to an absurd degree” the testimony from witnesses.
Prosecutors can appeal the court’s ruling 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 prosecutors, “no rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The court said the evidence was “insufficient” to establish Rivera’s guilt and the conviction was “unjustified and cannot stand.” With that ruling, the court did not even address other issues raised by Rivera’s attorneys.
This is another great win for the Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, which represents Rivera. The Center on Wrongful Convictions is as responsible as anybody for getting the Illinois death penalty abolished; they kept investigating death penalty cases, and kept finding evidence of innocence. 18 death-sentenced inmates were exonerated in Illinois before the Governor placed a moratorium on executions, and then the Illinois legislature abolished the death penalty.
While the ruling is noteworthy for Juan Rivera and his family, and while it has some interest to students of the Illinois court system, its relevance for us here in Virginia is this:
1. An state appellate court has reaffirmed the idea that appellate courts are at least occasionally called on to say that trial courts and trial juries just got something wrong. We frequently represent people on appeal who claim, “But I’m innocent. The jury believed the wrong guy!” And we have to advise them — as you will see if you go to other pages on our website — that appellate courts won’t be receptive to that kind of argument. Now, just because the Illinois courts are willing to review the evidence, that does not mean that Virginia courts will be. And as one judge once said to me when I quoted an out-of-state opinion, “They don’t listen to me; I don’t listen to them.” But at least it offers a little hope.
2. The Illinois court strongly condemns the prosecution for the preposterousness of their “unindicted co-ejaculator” argument. There have been similar arguments used in Virginia. For example, when DNA evidence showed many years after the trial that Earl Washington was not the contributor of the sperm found on the body of the woman that we was alleged to have killed, the state argued that he might still have committed the rape and murder — he just must have had a partner in crime. Eventually, DNA evidence was sufficiently conclusive that Earl got a full pardon on his capital murder conviction.
3. The Illinois court notes that the evidence against Rivera included the embellished and uncorroborated testimony of jailhouse snitches, and finds them inherently unreliable. In Virginia, our courts do not instruct juries of the inherent unreliability of the testimony of those who testify in return for favorable treatment.
4. The Illinois court discusses the unreliability of a coerced confession. In Virginia, we have no doubt about the reliability of confessions.
Ultimately, the Illinois Appellate Court said to itself, “We’ve got no physical evidence. We’ve got no eyewitness testimony. We’ve got DNA evidence that makes guilt seem highly unlikely. We’ve got jailhouse snitch evidence that we don’t believe. We’ve got a confession that is highly problematic. We do not have guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The Illinois Appellate Court got it right. The Virginia court system could take a lesson.
