Word: rolando
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...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...
...wild stories. The police took him on as an informant, settling him in a witness-protection housing complex, while he told what one of his lawyers concedes were lies. "It was a big game," says Northwestern University law professor Lawrence Marshall, who represented Cruz on appeal. "Nobody's defending Rolando for playing that game, but it doesn't deserve a death sentence...
...sense of fairness is being sorely tested. Communities are beginning to ask how prosecutors and police can be effective while still respecting citizens' rights. Now it's time for law-enforcement officials to start taking the question seriously too. "The criminal-justice system works," says Jed Stone, who represented Rolando Cruz in an early trial, "only if the ordinary citizen believes in the integrity of the system...
...they are too timid or too fearful of an unknown alternative for that. They still do not harbor the loathing for their leaders that finally drove East Europeans into open revolt. "Cubans are always waiting, for someone from the state, from outside, from God, to change their circumstances," says Rolando Suarez, director of the Catholic charity Caritas. "People are not willing to act in their own behalf...
...cite just one example, Rolando Cruz and another Chicago man were sentenced to death for the 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. The prosecution based its case on a "vision statement" from Cruz--a dream about the murder he'd allegedly recounted to police. The conviction was overturned, and Cruz was retried in 1990, but another man--who had actually confessed to the crime--was not allowed to testify, and Cruz was convicted on the same dream evidence. In 1994 the state Supreme Court overturned Cruz's second conviction, and the government began preparations...