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| Court: Freed Rapist Must Return to Prison to Complete His Sentence |
| By St. Louis Post-Dispatch |
| Published: 04/26/2002 |
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The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that an East St. Louis rapist freed 1 1/2 years ago because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision must return to finish his sentence because he entered a voluntary guilty plea. The defendant, Eugene Hill, now 37, was sentenced to 50 years in prison for rape, attempted murder and armed robbery of a woman in East St. Louis on New Year's Day 1982. The ruling apparently means Hill must return to prison to serve nearly seven more years before he is eligible for parole. He had filed a petition for release based on the Supreme Court's ruling almost two years ago in a New Jersey case. That ruling says defendants have a right to a jury decision on whether their crimes merit punishment beyond what the law under which they are charged prescribes. Hill was sentenced to 50 years - 20 years beyond the usual maximum - on grounds that his crime was exceptionally brutal. He and another man forced a woman into a vacant garage at gunpoint. They robbed her of $20 and raped her, then shot her in the head, face, arm and back, and left her for dead. Associate Judge Richard A. Aguirre said the Supreme Court ruling required that Hill be freed because he had already served more time than would have been required under the usual maximum. But in a ruling made public recently, the Illinois Supreme Court says Hill waived his right to having a jury decide whether he deserved an 'extended term' in prison by voluntarily pleading guilty. It based its decision in part on an earlier decision that the U.S. Supreme Court did not fashion new rights in the New Jersey case but merely clarified the longstanding right to a jury trial. By pleading guilty, a defendant waives that right, it said. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the law allowing extended sentences for exceptionally brutal crimes was not unconstitutional. Chief Justice Moses Harrison filed a dissent. He wrote that a guilty plea does not foreclose the right to challenge a judge's decision to impose an extended term. |
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