Advocates: People Facing Life Sentence for Murder Need More Legal Help

    January 13, 2008
    The Associated Press State & Local Wire
    By David Mercer


    Randy Steidl was freed from an Illinois prison in 2004 after a team that included top lawyers and a private investigator found that evidence used to convict him of murder in the 1986 stabbing deaths of a newlywed couple was flawed.

    But Steidl's friend Herb Whitlock, sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in the same killings on much the same evidence remained in prison until this week.

    The reason? Death-row inmates in Illinois are guaranteed high-caliber attorneys and money to pay investigators and others to work for them. After one appeal, those sentenced to life in prison are on their own.

    Whitlock's case illustrates the need to provide the same rights to those sentenced to life in prison for murder as granted to those sentenced to death, legal reform advocates say.

    The 61-year-old grandfather still might be in prison if not for a college professor and four students who decided to look into his case.

    "There's no doubt in my mind that Herb Whitlock was punished by not being sentenced to death," said Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess, who led a team of students that turned up information that eventually helped lead to Whitlock's release after 20 years in prison.

    "A bunch of 22-year-olds should not be the last line of defense against an innocent person remaining in prison."

    Reforms to help death-penalty defendants and convicts were enacted in Illinois in the late 1990s and the early part of this decade after a series of death-row inmates were released after evidence showed they were innocent. In 2000, then-Gov. George Ryan cleared out death row over worries that 13 inmates had been wrongfully convicted.

    Among the reforms were requirements that defendants facing death sentences have two attorneys qualified to handle such intense cases and access to the Capital Litigation Fund, a pot of money $10.2 million for the current fiscal year that pays for investigators, attorneys to handle all of their appeals and other expenses.

    Meanwhile, those facing life in prison get a lawyer most likely an overworked public defender and not much else, before or after their conviction, Protess said.

    "The disparity of resources that exists between a non-capital case and a capital case has led innocent people to be convicted," said Bill Clutter, a private investigator who worked on the Whitlock and Steidl cases and is director of investigations for the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project. The group works to free convicts it believes have been wrongly convicted.

    Steidl was convicted of stabbing newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads to death in their home in Paris, Ill., about 200 miles south of Chicago. Whitlock was convicted of killing Karen Rhoads.

    Police said the couple were stabbed more 20 times each and their house set on fire during a drug deal.

    But as early as 1992, Clutter and others found problems with some of the evidence a knife said by one witness to have been used in the killings didn't match the wounds; one witness, the self-described town drunk, changed his story, including at one point saying that "Jim and Ed" were responsible for the killings.

    Those problems and others led a judge to order Steidl freed or retried. The state declined to take him back to court.

    But Whitlock's case went nowhere until Protess in 2000 convinced Chicago attorneys Richard Kling and Susana Ortiz to take it.

    "If he'd had a good lawyer (earlier), I really believe it would have turned out differently and both men would have been freed at the same time," Protess said.

    Clutter wants the state, at minimum, to establish a fund to help defendants facing non-capital murder cases and convicts building their appeals hire attorneys and investigators.

    "Some of these reforms, they shouldn't be controversial," he said.

    Joe Birkett, the State's Attorney for DuPage County in suburban Chicago and president of the Illinois States' Attorneys Association, agreed that more money should be available for cases like Whitlock's along with more money for prosecutors and public defenders, period.

    "You can't skimp on public safety or the pursuit of justice," Birkett said. "That's something that falls on deaf ears far too often."

    In non-capital cases, defendants can have a paid attorney for an initial appeal, but not beyond that. Whitlock's first appeal was denied.

    The Illinois General Assembly included just over $200,000 in the budget now being debated in Springfield to help pay for investigators and other expenses in non-capital cases. That money was removed last fall in cuts by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

    Rep. Arthur Turner, a Chicago Democrat who tried to put the money in the budget, says he hopes it is restored in a spending bill this year or next. The relatively small amount of money, he said, is cheaper than what the state sometime pays out in civil suits filed by the wrongly convicted.

    "I think state government owes that to the guys who are incarcerated who may be innocent," said Turner, who sits on the House prison reform committee.

    Ideally, all states would set the same high standards for non-death penalty cases, particularly murder, as Illinois and others have for death penalty cases, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

    But money isn't always available, even to improve the standards and resources available to the accused or convicted in death penalty cases, much less others.

    Georgia recently increased its standards for the handling of capital cases.

    "They quickly exhausted their money," Dieter said. "The cases were starting to be done well, but they were expensive. The whole system there has bogged down."



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