Word: crimed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...kind of crime that breaks a community's heart. Ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, home from school with a cold, was taken from her suburban Chicago house in broad daylight, raped and killed. Her badly beaten body was discovered two days later in a wooded area six miles away. The public demanded that the murder be solved, and the police obliged. Du Page County residents slept a little better after police arrested Rolando Cruz, a street tough from a nearby town. Local prosecutors finished the job, presenting a solid case that landed Cruz on Illinois' death...
...officer later admitted that he testified inaccurately about a key piece of evidence used at Cruz's trial. Cruz was freed in 1995, after 11 years in jail. Another man--a convicted murderer and rapist whose earlier confession to the murder had been ignored--was linked to the crime by DNA. After an independent investigation, seven prosecutors and law-enforcement officials were indicted on charges of fabricating and suppressing evidence to frame Cruz...
...element to the growing national debate about overzealous law-enforcement agents, a furor stoked by high-profile police shootings in New York and California as well as "racial profiling" by New Jersey state troopers. The question is whether law enforcement, amid its extraordinary success in pushing the crime rate down, is showing too little regard for individual rights--especially those of blacks and Hispanics, who are most often targets of alleged misconduct. "We cannot have the kind of country we want if people are afraid of those folks who are trying to protect them," President Clinton said during his press...
...Then the so-called vision statement materialized. Detectives say Cruz told them he had a vision of Nicarico's killing, including details only the killer could know. The statement was the most damning piece of evidence against Cruz when he was tried and convicted of the crime. Still, it was always a little fishy. Despite its importance, the detectives hadn't tape-recorded it or even taken notes about it. But a prosecutor, Thomas Knight, claimed that detectives had told him about the vision statement. Cruz was convicted and sentenced to death...
...years for a double murder they did not commit reached a $36 million settlement with Cook County. In their suits, the so-called Ford Heights Four charged that the sheriff's office fabricated evidence and ignored or hid leads pointing to the four men who actually committed the crime. In the past dozen years, Illinois has freed 11 men from death row--one less than it has executed since 1977. Nine of the freed men were black or Latino...