Chicagoan imprisoned 17 years for murder
wins new trial based on evidence of innocence
Salvador Ortiz
Special to the Center on Wrongful Convictions
SPRINGFIELD — Declaring that “no person convicted of a crime should be deprived of life or liberty given compelling evidence of actual innocence,” the Illinois Supreme Court on November 19, 2009, ordered a new trial for Salvador Ortiz, a 40-year-old Chicagoan who has spent the last 17 years in prison for a murder that all known eyewitnesses say he did not commit.
The victim, Francisco Ramos, was beaten and shot five times near Gill Park on Sheridan Road on June 28, 1902. Ortiz was charged with the crime based on statements by two witnesses who told police they had seen the crime. Before Ortiz’s trial, both of those witnesses recanted their statements, saying their initial statements had been coerced by police. Saying that the recantations had “little, if any believability,” the trial judge, Dennis Dernbach, found Ortiz guilty and sentenced him to 47 years in prison.
After losing his direct appeal in 1996, Ortiz filed a petition for post conviction relief alleging ineffective assistance of counsel based on his trial lawyer’s failure to call three witnesses who would have corroborated his alibi. Judge Dernbach denied the claim and the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the denial. Ortiz then filed a second petition for post-conviction relief based on the affidavits of two eyewitnesses who had not testified at the trial. One of the eyewitnesses said she had failed to identify Ortiz in a lineup shortly after his arrest, and the other said that he had seen the murder and identified the killers as Oscar and Efrain Chacon. Dernbach denied that petition as well, and the Appellate Court affirmed in 2003.
The following year, Ortiz filed a third petition for post conviction relief, this one including a new affidavit of another witness who claimed to have seen both of the Chacons shoot Ramos. Dernbach denied the third petition, as he had the others. He said he found the testimony on which the conviction rested more credible than all of the evidence adduced since the trial. This time, the Appellate Court reversed the conviction, holding that “(t)he shift in strength of each side’s case would probably create a reasonable doubt of defendant’s guilt at retrial.”
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s office appealed, but the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the Appellate Court. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Anne M. Burke, the high court held that a petitioner raising a claim of actual innocence in a successive petition for post-conviction relief is not required to meet the onerous “cause and prejudice” test traditionally required of successive petitions. The Court also found that even though Ortiz’s first two petitions also raised actual innocence claims, his third petition presented a new claim because it was added new evidence of innocence not available at the time the previous petitions were filed.
Ortiz was represented on his third post-conviction petition by Jenny A. Austin, Mark A. Oates, Douglas B. Sanders, and Angela Vigil, of Baker & McKenzie. Attorneys Karen L. Daniel and Joshua A. Tepfer, of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, filed a brief amicus curiae in support of Ortiz. Northwestern University law students Chris Bernard, Jeff Han, Amy Malinowski, and Danya Resnick assisted in researching and drafting the amicus brief.
