Though Gov. James Thompson said he believes Cathleen Crowell Webb was raped and Gary Dotson was her attacker, he invoked ”mercy and compassion”
Sunday and commuted Dotson`s 25- to 50-year prison sentence to the six years already served.
”There were two victims in this case, society and Cathy Crowell Webb,”
Thompson said in press conference at the State of Illinois Center. ”Society has imprisoned Gary Dotson for six years. Cathy Crowell Webb has told us that she does not want to see him in prison any longer.”
Dotson, 28, of Country Club Hills, was convicted in 1979 on the basis of Webb`s powerful testimony against him. On Sunday, he stood outside his mother`s home and welcomed the news with relief and regret.
”I`m disappointed that I`m not considered innocent, but I`ve got to be happy. I`m free. I will pursue it in court more,” said Dotson, who is still awaiting action on his motion for a new trial. ”I can`t leave it alone.”
Thompson`s decision had the effect of satisfying public opinion on Dotson`s behalf without dismissing the mounting inconsistencies in Webb`s recantation, discrepancies exposed last week on national television during a three-day inquisition of her change of heart.
The governor admonished Webb for the testimony she gave before him and the state`s Prisoner Review Board, calling it ”either inherently incredible or flatly contradicted by other witnesses.” Though Thompson said he did not know why the 23-year-old New Hampshire woman had invented the recantation, he left no doubt about his incredulity. The board`s recommendation to Thompson was kept secret.
”I believe that Cathy Crowell Webb was raped on the evening of July 9, 1977,” Thompson said. ”I am satisfied that Gary Dotson was proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The sensational nature of Webb`s recantation captured the interest of a large cross section of the nation. It has had the effect of putting many people, and even the criminal justice system, on trial. Beyond the credibility of Webb`s recantation and Dotson`s claim of innocence, police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and, most recently, Thompson have all been held up to public scrutiny.
While Thompson was criticized by some for convening the extraordinary public hearing as a political media event, it, unlike the hearing last month before Cook County Judge Richard Samuels, allowed television viewers to judge for themselves the facts of the recantation. Furthermore, many of the witnesses brought before the board–but who had not been called at the original trial or at last month`s hearing–shed new light on 8-year-old events.
Though the weight of public opinion seemed clearly in Webb`s favor during her early media appearances and last month`s perjury hearing, the revelations of last week`s hearing seemed to erode some of that support.
The Republican governor, by accepting the petition for a clemency hearing and by questioning the 24 witnesses, cast himself in the role of a compassionate Solomon. At the same time, the threats of state Democrats to subpoena his administration for its role in investigating the salmonella epidemic faded.
What viewers saw broadcast into their homes as local television stations preempted soap operas was impressive: The former U.S. attorney who questioned Webb so intensely and methodically that the weaknesses in her recantation story began to show.
But even before the challenges to Webb`s testimony were completed Saturday, the last day of the hearing, the suspense over whether Dotson would be sent back to prison had virtually ended.
On Saturday, after questioning Webb for two days, sources close to Thompson said he already had decided to commute Dotson`s sentence on Mother`s Day, a tentative decision that created havoc with his legal advisers and imagemakers.
The timing of the public decision, and the fear that it would be interpreted as a calculated attempt to capitalize on the sentimentality of the holiday and damage the new public image he had fashioned since Thursday, caused his top aides and even his wife, Jayne, to ask Thompson to announce his decision on Monday.
”It`s his call. He`s the boss,” one aide said last weekend. ”We`ve all asked him not to do it. But that`s all we can do.”
In making his announcement Sunday, Thompson underlined the omnipotence of his office in cases of clemency. Speaking of himself in the third person, Thompson said, ”This power is the most awesome possessed by a governor. His decision to grant or deny mercy in any case in unreviewable by anyone.”
He said his decision to deny Dotson a pardon was based not only on the unbelievability of Webb`s recantation but on the unconvincing testimony of Dotson`s own alibi witnesses.
”If anything, the evidence at the hearing before the board and me was stronger than at the trial,” he said. ”The alibi evidence, which has constantly shifted since 1977, did not overcome the evidence of guilt.”
Dotson`s 1979 trial was hardly covered by the media, outside of brief accounts describing the charges and noting that Dotson had been accused by his victim of carving her abdomen with words ”resembling” love and hate. The young victim`s name was not reported, as is the custom at most news organizations with rape stories.
Six years later, Webb went public, though not as the victim but as the victimizer. Last March 29, the tearful mother went before the considerable audience of the ”Today” show to confess that she had cried rape only to disguise a teenage sexual indiscretion. When she left the NBC studios that morning, a limousine from ABC was waiting to ferry her and her lawyer to the
”Good Morning America” show. The campaign that began that Friday grew wildly. In the six weeks since, the Webb`s story has been covered worldwide.
Though Webb`s efforts to free Dotson began with a simple confession, Thompson`s decision illustrated that the case was more complex than simple, more mysterious than clear. It provided some answers but raised many questions.
The inconsistencies in her testimony were numerous. Webb told Thompson that she was impelled to identify Dotson and tentatively identify his best friend, Michael Marcum, so as not to be exposed as a liar after telling police she had been raped in a car on July 9, 1977.
Thompson said during the hearing that he was troubled by the coincidence that Webb would have identified both by chance. She explained that her identification of Dotson was made simply because her faked description to a police sketch artist matched so closely Dotson`s photograph. She said she identified Marcum at the suggestion of police investigators. That testimony later was disputed by police and her legal guardians, Bernard and Carol Smith. Another contradiction to Webb`s story was the testimony of David Beirne, her former teenage boyfriend. Thompson singled out the discrepancy between Beirne and Webb`s testimonies regarding their relationship as a primary reason for doubting her story.
In testimony before Judge Richard Samuels and the Prisoner Review Board, Webb said she panicked after she and Beirne had sexual intercourse ”a few days” before fabricating the rape story. Webb told the panel that she discussed her fears with Beirne following their last sexual encounter.
Beirne, however, denied both of Webb`s statements, and Thompson said he thought that Beirne had ”no motive, eight years later, to lie.”
Perhaps one of the more troubling inconsistencies in her testimony before Samuels and the panel was that Webb said she could not recall inflicting wounds to the interior of her vaginal area although Dr. Andrew Labrador of South Suburban Hospital testified that he found internal injuries that had been caused ”several hours earlier.”
Conversely, Webb told investigators from the Cook County state`s attorney`s office that she had inflicted cuts to her outer vaginal area in an attempt to suggest the effects of rape. Labrador, however, found no such evidence.
She told the panel that she inflicted random cuts on her abdomen while standing in a darkened woods a mile from her home, yet sketches of those cuts, drawn by Labrador and a Homewood police officer, showed the cuts to resemble deliberately drawn letters.
”These are markings done in the dark in a secluded woods, written upside and backward?” Thompson asked Webb during the opening day of testimony Thursday.
”It wasn`t my intention to do letters,” said Webb, though Anna Carroll, the Homewood police officer who took Webb to the hospital the night the 16-year-old said she had been raped, testified differently. On Saturday she told Thompson and the board that at the hospital Webb herself had noted that the scratches resembled letters.
Still another inconsistency was that Webb said she was feigning hysteria after the purported attack. Her foster mother, Carroll and examining physicians disputed that her emotions were faked.
Prosecutor Peggy Frossard hammered away at this point, testifying Saturday that it simply ”defies common sense and everyday experience that a 16-year-old girl could fake a rape so convincingly.”
Frossard also argued before the panel that Webb had failed to explain how she suffered a golf-ball-sized lump on the back of her head that she said in 1979 had been caused when she hit her head on the door frame of her attacker`s car.
Though Webb had recalled mundane events of that day with precision, she said she had no recollection of how she suffered the lump on her head.
”If you had sustained an injury that large, wouldn`t you recall how it happened,” Frossard asked rhetorically.
The hearing, which one television cameraman said reminded him of
”listening in on someone`s private telephone conversation,” also included embarrassing and damaging testimony regarding the physical evidence found on Webb in 1977. Twice, a large color slide of Webb`s underwear was projected on a giant screen in the 600-seat auditorium, showing an 11-by-3-inch semen stain that she said had been caused by discharge resulting from strenuous physical labor.
But a forensic specialist from the Illinois crime lab said Webb`s explanation was implausible. The chances of that size stain being secreted even after 24 hours, he said, were ”low to improbable.”
The people whom Webb had relied on in 1977 to investigate her rape charge and carry it to trial have been criticized by her in the last six weeks. Her foster parents, who testified that they never urged her to prosecute Dotson, were dismissed by Webb as cold and distant after they told reporters they did not believe Webb`s recantation.
Police officers, who her foster parents said had treated Webb ”like a princess” during their investigation, were attacked by Webb for having suggested that she identify both Dotson and Marcum, who was never charged.
Prosecutors, who won a conviction against Dotson in 1979 based on what one called her ”excrutiatingly detailed testimony,” were accused by Webb last week of having forced her to memorize her statements in advance of the trial.
Assistant State`s Attorneys J. Scott Arthur and Frossard were asked by Thompson Saturday why they thought Webb might be fabricating a recantation. Arthur demured, and Frossard said she could only guess that perhaps Webb had taken a phenomenon common among rape victims–denial–and stretched it too far.
On Sunday, Thompson`s query was read back to him.
”I`ll leave that to public opinion,” he said to the toughest question of all.
