Executing Justice
James Free, an army mechanic, was sentenced to death by a Du Page County jury in 1979 for the 1978 murder of a woman he attacked in a data processing center, the attempted murder of another, and the attempted rape of both. Free’s lawyer argued that he had no history of violent criminal behavior, that his army record was unblemished, and that at the time of his crimes he was under the influence of beer, PCP, and marijuana.
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The jury was not swayed. But years later a University of Chicago researcher, the late professor Hans Zeisel, conducted a study based on the instructions Free’s jury received from the bench before it sentenced him. He concluded that the judge’s state-mandated language probably confused the jury more than it helped it understand how to weigh Free’s crimes against the evidence offered in mitigation of them. On the strength of Zeisel’s study, U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen ordered Free resentenced in 1992. But finding Zeisel’s methodology faulty, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Aspen in March of ’94, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the case.
Williams’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court challenged the standard, but the court refused to hear it. Yet ten months later the court granted a similar petition in another case, Batson v. Kentucky, and the old standard came crashing down. Under Batson the all-white jury that sentenced Williams to death could never have been constituted.
Won’t this make clemency less likely? I asked.
You might remember her name. In 1990 Bishop’s sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and Richard Langert, were found shot to death at their home in Winnetka. The crime was not quickly solved, and the FBI and local police soon came up with a spectacular theory that the media lapped up: Irish Republican Army assassins were behind the murders, and Bishop herself had been the intended victim–because the IRA suspected she’d turned FBI informant. (A lawyer, Bishop represented illegal Irish immigrants, was active in Northern Ireland’s human rights causes, and traveled there frequently. A fellow lawyer would say that FBI agents suggested to him that she’d been smuggling in weapons components.)
What temperament is required? I asked.
