Previous post
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a major RED FLAG.
While state attorney general in 1992, Burris aggressively sought the death penalty for Rolando Cruz, who twice was convicted of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. The crime took place in 1983.
But by 1992, another man had confessed to the crime, and Burris’ own deputy attorney general was pleading with Burris to drop the case, then on appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court.Burris refused. He was running for governor.
… Burris’ role in the Cruz case was “indefensible and in defiance of common sense and common decency,” Warden said. “There was obvious evidence that [Cruz] was innocent.”
Deputy attorney general Mary Brigid Kenney agreed and eventually resigned rather than continue to prosecute Cruz.
Once Burris assigned Kenney to the case in 1991, she became convinced that Cruz was innocent, a victim of what she believed was prosecutorial misconduct. She sent Burris a memo reporting that the jury convicted Cruz without knowing that Brian Dugan, a repeat sex offender and murderer, had confessed to the crime. Burris never met with Kenney to discuss a new trial for Cruz, Kenney told ProPublica.
“This is something the attorney general should have been concerned about,” Kenney, now an assistant public guardian in Cook County, said in an interview. “I knew the prosecutor’s job was not merely to secure conviction but to ensure justice was done.”
Kenney was not alone in her beliefs. Prior to Cruz’s 1985 trial, the lead detective in the case resigned in protest over prosecutors’ handling of the case, according to news reports at the time.
And rather than argue Burris’ case before the state supreme court, Kenney also stepped down.
“What I took away was that [Burris] wasn’t going to do anything to seem soft on crime,” Kenney said. “He didn’t have the guts.”
In her resignation letter, Kenney claimed Burris had “seen fit to ignore the evidence in this case.”
“I cannot sit idly by as this office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution of Rolando Cruz,” she wrote. “I realized that I was being asked to help execute an innocent man.”
Burris’ response at the time: “It is not for me to place my judgment over a jury, regardless of what I think.” (We have also left a message for Burris at his office and will post an update if we hear back.)
State prosecutors carried on with the prosecution, even after DNA evidence in 1995 excluded Cruz as the victim’s rapist and linked somebody else, sex offender Brian Dugan, to the crime.
With DNA evidence proving the man’s innocence, and a confession from the actual murderer, I don’t know what Burris was thinking. It’s horrible. That man should not be anywhere near a position of power.
Obama’s not even in office yet, but look at the kind of corruption already swirling around him. Interesting, isn’t it, to know the kind of political system in Chicago that our President-Elect came from.
Hat Tip: Ace
Contrasted with that…three racists dragged James Byrd to death behind a truck. The NAACP thought all three of them should’ve gotten the death penalty. In fact, two of them got death, the third one, who was the hardest one to convict, got life in prison. NAACP didn’t like that. They thought he should have been executed. And somehow, in ways they never did define, Governor Bush was supposedly culpable in keeping that from happening.
I point that out because that’s what a George W. Bush scandal, with regard to matters of murder and justice, looks like.
I see you predicted buyers’ remorse in the year ahead for Obama voters. I predict some will wax nostalgically for Obama’s predecessor and his more benign form of “scandals,” although in a century or more, they’d never admit it.
Yeah, “interesting”, that’s one word for it. 🙂
I’ve lived here my whole life. Politics is a contact sport in Illinois.
That case in particular is a famous one here, and I’ve read a lot about it.
The guy who quite obviously should have been charged all along, Brian Dugan, is already serving a life sentence for a similar murder and is going on trial for the 1983 murder very soon, like within days. He offered to plead guilty to that murder about 15 or more years ago, in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but the DuPage prosecutor said “no”. More important to hang somebody than to prosecute the right guy, I guess.
It’s stunning and sad the kind of power games that politicians play with people’s lives in order to gain the voter’s favor.
When they finally brought charges against various people in the prosecutor’s office in the late 90s, they were found not guilty, and the jury and the defendants went off *together* to celebrate at a local restaurant. Hmmm. Nope, nothing strange there!
As for Burris, he strikes me as a typical Illinois politician: sharp as a footstool, lacking in moral fiber, and probably with his hand in the till.
Congratulations, America! Nice “change” ya got there.
This kind of thing is by no means confined to Illinois. Remember Mike Nifong?
Whenever I see some scumbag on trial and represented by a scumbag defense attorney, I have to remind myself that even the scummiest of scumbags is entitled to a legitimate defense to protect him/herself from the scumbag prosecutors and cops who lie in order to obtain no-knock warrants with tragic results.
“Obama’s not even in office yet, but look at the kind of corruption already swirling around him.”
How very typical of the garden-variety wingnut. There is no evidence that Obama had any involvement with Blagojevich’s selection of Burris, and in fact Obama opposes allowing Burris to be seated in the Senate. But the facts are of no interest to wingnuts like Cassie. It’s all about finding mud — any mud at all, no matter how thin, no matter how lacking in any factual basis — and slinging it, hoping desperately that something will stick.
Remember, folks — the wingnut is your best entertainment value.
spike says: meatbrain, i have yet to see anyone with a more honestly descriptive screen name-are you trying to pass off the moonbat fairy tale that obama spent years and years involved in the cesspool that is chicago politics, hanging with ‘tony the fixer’ rezko, emil ‘the godfather’ jones, and the like and stayed ‘squeaky-clean?’ dude, i was born on a saturday, but it wasn’t LAST saturday if the fawning, drooling leg tinglers of the msm would spend at least as much time checking obama as they did in crawling thru septic tanks in wasilla or rummaging thru ‘joe the plumber’s sock drawer, we might have something besides obama’s self-serving fauxtobiographies to give us an idea what he’s all about…there’s an old saying: ‘the truth will come out’-when it does, it’ll be jonestown all over again with the obamarrhoid zombies
This, of course, is the “but… but… but… CHICAGO!!!!” meme so beloved of the fact-challenged wingnut. Spike cannot provide any facts that link Obama to the Burris appointment, so he does what bumblenuts of his stripe has always done: he squats, grunts, and starts throwing his own excretions.
No thought, no reason, just hurling drek in every direction. Thanks, Spike ol’ buddy. I am always grateful when a moron like you jumps in and demonstrates the essential emptiness of what we will, for lack of a better word, call your “arguments”.
6 Comments