Oct. 23--A Tribune news story this week reported that Waukegan-based attorney Jed Stone plans to offer an astonishing defense for his client, Jorge Torrez, at his upcoming murder trial in Lake County.
"Our defense in this case is that Hobbs did it," Stone told a judge. "He confessed to really good detectives that the state has always respected in the past. And the DNA is junk."
Hobbs is Jerry Hobbs, the father of Laura Hobbs, who was 8 when she was brutally slain in 2005 along with her friend Krystal Tobias, 9, in a park in Zion. And he did indeed sign a confession and was originally charged in the case.
One reason it's astonishing is that Hobbs' confession -- obtained at 5 a.m. after some 20 hours of off-and-on interrogation shortly after the girls' bodies were found -- was later discredited by the DNA evidence that prosecutors now say implicates Torrez. Hobbs was released after five years in jail and negotiated roughly $8 million in settlement payments after he sued various local government units for their role in his wrongful incarceration.
Another reason it's astonishing is that Torrez is such a likely suspect. Not only does semen found in and on one of the victims match his genetic profile, he also lived near the victims at the time of the killing and was friends with Krystal's older brother. Furthermore, in the intervening years Torrez has been convicted of a series of attacks on women in the Washington, D.C., area, crimes for which he received five life sentences, and the murder of a female sailor, for which he was sentenced to death last year.
And the final reason the "Hobbs did it" defense is astonishing is that it's Jed Stone mounting it.
Stone is known as an outspoken critic of heavy-handed police tactics, and at one time he represented Juan Rivera, a Waukegan man who confessed under duress in the middle of the night to a murder that DNA evidence later established he didn't commit. In a 2012 forum at Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions, Stone decried the "epidemic" of false confessions that pervert justice.
"The irony of Mr. Stone's statements certainly is not lost on me," replied current Lake County State's Attorney Michael Nerheim when I emailed him on this matter.
But where Nerheim hears irony I hear sarcasm.
This trial, slated to begin next year, is a waste of time and money. Torrez will never again walk free regardless of the verdict -- he didn't even offer a defense at his death penalty hearing last year, and he can't get another death penalty here because Illinois has abolished capital punishment. Nerheim's excuse that "the family of these victims, as well as the community as a whole, deserves closure" belies that there remains no serious doubt about who attacked those girls.
In an exchange with me this week, Stone said he hasn't had the DNA evidence retested yet so he can't actually back up his claim that it's "junk."
The preposterous "Hobbs did it" defense is both his only option as a defense attorney and a great opportunity for an activist to embarrass law enforcement officials for their previous conduct in the case.
"Will the Lake County state's attorney actually go after those cops and expose their police practices for what they are?" Stone asked me. "Will the state argue to a jury that the confession was unreliable, coerced, false? Aren't you just a tad curious to see how the state will prosecute Torrez given the fact that they held Hobbs for five years on the same charge?"
I am.
Particularly given that Nerheim's predecessor kept Hobbs locked up for more than two years after his office discovered that Hobbs was not the source of the DNA evidence, based on the theory that the girls must have been playing in an area where people had had sex. It was only after a national database search finally matched the evidence to convicted predator Jorge Torrez that authorities grudgingly agreed to release Hobbs.
"Please don't miss the wonderful subtlety of this," said Stone. "I should be able to sell tickets for the state's cross of their heroes. Perhaps the court will adjourn to the Genesee Theatre and we can all watch the prosecutors attack the believability of the task force cops who took the confession."
The memory of the victims deserves better than a tendentious show trial. But Lake County is asking for it.
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