From death row to hero
How Randy Steidl became the face of capital punishment repeal
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT | Bill Clutter
At the State Capitol, former death row inmate Randy Steidl became the improbable champion in the successful campaign to get the General Assembly to abolish the death penalty. Now he is trying to persude Gov. Pat Quinn to sign the repeal into law. He traveled a long road from death row to Springfield’s halls of power.
We began working on Randy’s case in October 1991, after the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and set his execution date. Springfield attorney Mike Metnick, who earlier that year represented Alejandro Hernandez pro bono in the infamous Nicarico case, agreed to take on the cause of saving Randy’s life. Mike Metnick again volunteered his legal services without pay. The reward for that work finally paid off when the General Assembly voted last week to abolish the death penalty.
John Hanlon, now the legal director at the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project at UIS, worked all night long in April of 1992 writing Randy’s petition for post-conviction relief in Mike Metnick’s law office, which was above the Vinegar Hill Mall. By 7 a.m. we had appended the affidavits supporting the facts that revealed Randy’s innocence. We placed the petition in the trust of our runner, Paul Wetmore, who drove it to Paris, the Edgar County seat, to be filed. It was the last day of the statute of limitations for filing the petition. If some awful auto accident had impeded its delivery, all appeals in Randy’s case would have stopped there. The execution would have proceeded as scheduled.
Within four months of our investigation on Randy’s case, we developed the evidence that a federal judge would later rely on to order Randy’s release 17 years after he was convicted. His case involved no DNA, which made the job that much more difficult.
A copy of the petition made its way to Illinois Times. IT editor Fletcher Farrar assigned a young reporter, Wendy Stassel, and photographer Ginny Lee to accompany me to the condemned unit at Pontiac penitentiary so that Randy could tell his story. No one outside of Randy’s family and friends had heard about his case until it was published in these pages Sept. 9, 1993. Randy’s picture was on the front cover of Illinois Times. The story of his innocence was told in the press for the first time.
The story also told of the inept representation Randy received by his former trial counsel.
That attorney later sued me and IT for libel. He was not happy that the story suggested he was ineffective. Truth being a defense prevailed. The case was eventually dismissed.
A week after the story ran, I offered to “recycle” the batch of papers that were left at the newsstands.
