JUDGING CRIMES

This is what Rockwell Gardens used to look like - one of those Stalinist Chicago housing projects consisting of multiple high-rises isolated on a kind of dystopian campus, this one three miles west of the Loop.  Apparently, the six buildings have all been demolished in the last couple of years - and the news of their imminent razing was enough to revitalize the entire neighborhood, as the Chicago Reader reported in 2005.

Back in the bad old days, Christine Parker was a pregnant 33-year-old grandmother living in the project with her two daughters, aged 15 and 13, and the 15-year-old's son, Jontae, who was three.  (The mind resists doing the math, doesn't it?)  They were all strangled to death, and Jontae was raped.

The bodies were discovered August 16, 1982, at 12:55 p.m.  Shortly afterward, the police began a canvass of nearby units, knocking on doors and asking if people had heard anything or could provide any useful information.  They went to the apartment James Ealy shared with his mother.  The cops spoke to the mother, but Ealy wasn't home.

That afternoon, police returned to the apartment.  This time Ealy was home and said that he had known the victims, but that was all.  The next day autopsies were performed, and around 5:00 p.m. detectives learned that the victims had been strangled with distinctive cloth ligatures.  Detectives returned to Rockwell Gardens and talked to five people who, they had discovered, were in the habit of spending a lot of time in Ms. Parker's apartment.  One of them was Ealy.

Sometime after 9:00 p.m., Ealy agreed to come to the police station.  They arrived around 9:40 and he was left alone in an interview room for about 20 minutes, then questioned for about half an hour.  He wasn't given Miranda warnings; he wasn't a suspect yet.  When the detective took a break to consult with his colleagues, he noticed Mrs. Ealy waiting for her son.  He let her in to be with him.

Around 11:00 p.m., the detective learned for the first time that Ealy had recently been arrested for an unrelated rape committed in the same Rockwell Gardens building.  This, of course, nudged him up the ladder of suspicion.  The detective returned to the interview room, Mirandized Ealy, and spoke with him for another 30 minutes.  Discrepancies were beginning to appear in his story.  Sometime in there Mrs. Ealy returned home.

Ealy signed a consent-to-search form.  Detectives took it back to the the housing project, showed it to Mrs. Ealy, and for good measure asked if she would consent to let them into the apartment, too.  She also signed a form allowing the police to search without a warrant.  At around 1:45 a.m., they found distinctive cloth items, prepared for garroting with knots on both ends, made from cloth matching the ligatures used on the Parker family.

At this point, I think everyone would agree, there was probable cause to arrest Ealy.

The cops took the incriminating items back to the station and confronted Ealy with them.  It was now the middle of the night.

Thereafter, defendant told the officers that on August 15, at about 11:30 p.m., he was near the Parkers' apartment and saw a large black man running from the apartment carrying a large bundle which he dropped. After picking up the bundle, defendant went into the Parkers' apartment and found the victims' bodies. He said he then left the apartment, taking the bundle with him to his mother's apartment, placed the bundle under his mother's bed and went to sleep.

This, I think everyone would agree, was virtually a confession.  He put himself in the apartment, in the possession of the materials used to kill the family, admitted he didn't alert authorities - and all in a package that a child (and especially not a child raised in Rockwell Gardens) wouldn't believe.

Ealy signed a second consent-to-search form, and detectives went back to Rockwell Gardens to pick up other items from his bedroom.  They discovered that Mrs. Ealy - who had evidently reached the same conclusions - had hidden some things, but when asked to retrieve them she did.  Detectives then returned with the new bundle of items, gave Ealy his Miranda warnings again, and he told them that

on August 15 he had been drinking with friends. He later went to the Parkers' apartment at approximately 11:30 p.m. and several members of the Parker family "made fun of his red eyes." Defendant then described to the detectives how he strangled the four victims.

The Illinois Appellate Court reviewed his four murder convictions, but its decision is opaque.  It reads rather like the mutterings of an eccentric relative talking to himself in the next room, when you overhear sentences and phrases that make sense in isolation but don't really add up to anything.  

My guess is that the judges were trying to say that (1) at some point Ealy was arrested, and (2) at some point police acquired probable cause to arrest him, but (3) those events occurred in that sequence, when they should have occurred in the opposite order.  However, the opinion is very vague as to when the key events occurred.

(You can read a close paraphrase of the opinion here.  The paraphrase faithfully mirrors the original's lack of precision, echoes its idiosyncratic use of the word "continuously" to mean "intermittently", and even repeats its use of "18 hours" to mean "three and a half hours" - Illinois slang, I presume.) 

(It was about three and a half hours from his first stationhouse interview to the discovery of the ligatures under his bed.  However, it was almost 18 hours from the time he left his apartment with police until he finished repeating the confession for a stenographer and signing his name to the transcript.  The latter time obviously has nothing to do with pinpointing the time of his arrest or the time at which his arrest became lawful.  The Appellate Court's use of the phrase "18 hours" was a type of dishonesty.)

The Appellate Court set Ealy free.  Flash forward to 2006, when Ealy is accused of murdering - by strangulation, who would have guessed it? - another person - and, surprise, another female.  During the intervening years, he served time for two rapes (including, it would seem, the one he committed before killing the Parkers), according to Chicago's suburban Daily Herald.  And does anyone believe he was caught every time he committed a crime?

In the last post, I talked about what happens when the police fail to arrest a suspect.  That failure can lead directly to further suffering - so directly that courts are prepared to let cops be sued for the failure.    (See post 223.)  If the logic of those tort cases were applied to the James Ealy case, we would have to conclude that the three judges of the Illinois Appellate Court caused the rape of at least one person, and that there's probable cause to think they caused the death of another, and the orphaning of three children.