Pardon requests for exonerated people don’t belong on back burner

The vagaries of the criminal justice system caught our eye last week as a clemency hearing was held for a convicted killer — while pardon requests for wrongfully convicted people languish in limbo.

The Tuesday clemency hearing was for Robert Turner, one of three men who used a car equipped with a police-like flashing red light and posed as police officers to pull over Bridget Drobney of Downers Grove in 1985. The men abducted Drobney, who was driving alone to a family wedding reception. She was raped and her throat was slit in a Macoupin County cornfield.

Turner tried to escape being convicted as the most culpable participant in the crime by falsely trying to pin the blame on one of the other men, Daniel Hines. According to court records, he also tried to shift blame to a cellmate, Harold Meyers, saying Meyers planted a razor, a wire and a knife-like instrument found on Turner shortly after he was arrested.

In 1990, in an apparent attempt to avoid a stiff re-sentencing, Turner invented testimony that made him the star witness against Rolando Cruz, leading to Cruz’s wrongful conviction at a retrial for the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville. Cruz subsequently was exonerated, but not until 1995. Turner also wrote a letter to prosecutors offering to testify against seven other death row inmates.

Turner was sentenced to death, but that was changed to life in prison in 2003 when then-Gov. George Ryan commuted all death sentences to life in prison. In 2011, Illinois abolished the death penalty.

Yet, as the Illinois Prisoner Review Board considered Turner’s clemency petition last week, we heard nothing about the pardon request, for example, from Gordon “Randy” Steidl, who in 1977 was the 18th person to be freed after having been sentenced to death in Illinois.

Steidl spent 17 years in prison, 12 of them on death row, for a 1986 downstate double murder he didn’t commit. After he was exonerated, he became an advocate for abolishing the death penalty, appearing before numerous state legislatures as they considered doing so and also speaking at colleges and communities of faith. Illinois and other states might still be sentencing defendants to death based on scant evidence without Steidl’s dogged and thoughtful testimony.

But last week Steidl told us he isn’t holding his breath waiting for a pardon, which he has said he wants to clear his family name. He first asked for a gubernatorial pardon in 2002, four governors ago.

“It is hard to get an innocence-based pardon, even if you are innocent,” he said.

The Prisoner Review Board has been the target of political struggles in recent years, alternately accused of being too liberal or too conservative as its membership has shifted. A year ago, the 15-member board was in disarray as the state Senate refused to confirm Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s appointments, leaving the board without a quorum. In his race against Pritzker last year, Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey made an issue of the board, saying Pritzker’s appointees were soft on crime.

Turner certainly has a legal right to petition for clemency, which would let him out of prison. His supporters say he has changed himself while behind bars and that almost 40 years in prison is a sufficient sentence. Drobney’s family opposes Turner’s release. The Prisoner Review Board will make a confidential recommendation to Pritzker, who has the last word in these matters.

We hope Pritzker doesn’t get so distracted by other requests to the point that those who deserve innocence-based pardons remain overlooked.

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