Saying a breakdown occurred in the adversarial process of the court system, a Cook County Circuit Court judge Tuesday ordered a new sentencing hearing for a Death Row inmate convicted of murdering four people.
Leroy Orange, 47, who has been in jail since 1984, showed no emotion as Judge Daniel Locallo announced his ruling, which criticized Orange’s former attorney, Earl Washington.
Locallo said that mitigating evidence is crucial in a death penalty hearing to counter or balance evidence and arguments from prosecutors and that Washington “presented no mitigation to the sentencing judge. At the sentencing phase, he did nothing. . . . Because of Earl Washington’s failure to investigate and present mitigation, this court finds there was a breakdown in the adversarial process.”
In a series of hearings conducted by Locallo since February, Orange’s current attorney, Thomas Geraghty, has called 12 family members, acquaintances and friends of Orange’s to testify they would have appeared in court to ask the trial judge to spare Orange’s life if they had been asked.
One witness told Locallo he had called Washington’s office to volunteer his testimony but was never contacted by the attorney.
The testimony presented to Locallo described Orange’s willingness to help the witnesses through hardship, his responsibility in working several jobs to support his family and his honesty.
A jury convicted Orange in 1985 on multiple counts of concealing a homicide and aggravated arson, as well as four counts of murder in the deaths of his former girlfriend, Renee Coleman, 27; her son, Anthony, 10; Michelle Jointer, 30; and Ricardo Pedro, 25, in a South Side apartment.
Prosecutors and police said Orange confessed to the Jan. 12, 1984, killings after his arrest later that day. But his half-brother, Leonard Kidd, who pleaded guilty in the case, said during Orange’s trial that he fatally stabbed the victims.
Kidd was sentenced to death for those slayings and received a second death sentence in 1987 in an unrelated case, an arson killing 10 children in a Chicago building in 1980.
Washington on Tuesday repeated what he has said in the past–that he did not try to call mitigating witnesses because Orange didn’t want him to.
“Mr. Orange felt that the sentence was inevitable,” Washington said.
Prosecutor Dave O’Connor challenged the ruling.
“Any time a butcher like Leroy Orange gets a new sentencing hearing, it seems to mock the memories of the dead,” O’Connor said. “I will fight with every fiber of my body to put Leroy Orange back where he belongs–on Death Row.”
The next hearing in the case was scheduled for July 29.
