Dugan case opens questions about justice

Sometimes a case is so open-and-shut that you don’t know if it should be open or closed.

An example is the hearing under way in DuPage County to decide if Brian Dugan deserves the death penalty for brutally murdering Jeanine Nicarico, 10, of Naperville, in 1983.

Dugan has admitted killing Jeanine as well as Melissa Ackerman, 7, in 1985, and Donna Schnorr, 27, in 1984. The murders all were unspeakably horrible, and Dugan committed other serious crimes, including rapes, so it will be no surprise if the jury votes to execute him. An open-and-shut case.

Yet, this time the open-and-shut case has a leaky spot in its logic: Dugan knows he very likely wouldn’t be facing the death penalty if he had kept his mouth closed after DuPage authorities rejected a plea agreement with him in 1985.

After he was arrested for Melissa’s murder, he had a chance to plead guilty to all his crimes in exchange for life sentences instead of the death penalty. Dugan admitted to three sex attacks and the three murders. Officials from other counties accepted the pleas, but DuPage authorities refused to accept a plea for Jeanine’s murder. Back then, DuPage officials already had put two other men on Death Row for the crime and were pursuing the conviction of a third man.

Dugan could have gone off to serve his prison sentence and said no more. The plea deal was off the table, but he kept talking. Under an agreement that his words wouldn’t be used against him, he gave Illinois State Police enough information to tie him to Jeanine’s murder. Had Dugan not spoken up, Rolando Cruz, one of the men originally sent to Death Row for the crime, in all probability would have been executed. Quite possibly two others, Stephen Buckley and Alejandro Hernandez, would have been executed as well.

From 1985 to 1991, three juries saw open-and-shut cases against Cruz and Hernandez. By talking, Dugan helped to reopen those cases. (Buckley got a hung jury in 1985. After the story about Dugan came out and other evidentiary developments, charges against Buckley were dropped.)

I’m guessing that Dugan thinks there’s another open-and-shut case here. His argument would run something like this: By trusting his words wouldn’t be used against him, even indirectly, he saved the criminal justice system from executing innocent people. Therefore, authorities should settle for the sentence he is already serving — life in prison with no chance for parole.

But besides Dugan’s own lawyers, I haven’t heard many people making that case. You could argue that the state has an interest in obtaining the death penalty for people whose crimes are heinous enough. And you could argue prosecutors aren’t using his words against him, just other information, including DNA, that came out after Dugan put authorities on his trail.

This case, however, puts the jury in a difficult position:

Vote to spare Dugan from the death penalty, and it feels like you are ignoring the pain his many crimes have caused.

Vote to give him a lethal injection, and the message you send discourages criminals from coming forward if others are being charged with their crimes. Perhaps more to the point, it discourages their lawyers from seeking a way to save innocent people if it means they’ll be betraying their own clients.

Look at the Cook County case of Alton Logan, freed last year after 26 years in prison when lawyers Jamie Kunz and Dale Coventry revealed that their client Andrew Wilson had claimed he committed the murder for which Logan was convicted. I bet Logan wishes there had been a way for Wilson’s lawyers to get that information out without having to wait for Wilson to die first.

In recent years, we have learned there are lots of Alton Logans sitting behind bars for crimes committed by others. I bet those people, too, wish there were an easier way for the truth to come out.

If Dugan gets the death penalty, it will be hard for him to argue he’s getting a worse deal than he gave his victims.

For the rest of us, though, the case really isn’t so open-and-shut.

Thomas Frisbie is the Sun-Times nation/world editor and co-author of Victims of Justice Revisited, a book about the trials involving Rolando Cruz and Brian Dugan.