Interesting Development

Finally, another branch of government stepping up to the plate:

• This fall, Cook County prosecutors reversed course on two men accused in a decades-old double murder. The cases against Wayne Antusas and Nicholas Morfin were on shaky ground, they said. The judges should throw out their convictions, and in turn prosecutors would drop the charges and the men would be freed.

  It is a common enough story for a state’s attorney’s office that boasts a progressive record reversing wrongful convictions. It usually ends with the inmate’s joyful release from custody, and later, a lucrative lawsuit.

  But instead, the judges presiding over Antusas’ and Morfin’s cases made an almost unheard-of move. They disagreed with the reversal plan.

  It is ultimately judges’ responsibility — not prosecutors’ — to decide if convictions should stand, they said. "I do not think it is good practice for a judge to rubber-stamp an agreement the parties have entered into on something the court, not the parties, have province over,” Judge Timothy Joyce said in court.

Imagine that - judges who actually stand behind the system and insist on (in one of these cases) an evidentiary hearing to assist in determining if this is just another attempt by the county prosecutors to side-step their responsibility to prosecute crimes. And (in both of these cases) apply the felony murder rule where everyone involved in the crime is held responsible to the Law.