Rolando Cruz (born 1963) is an American man known for having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, along with co-defendant Alejandro Hernandez, for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County, Illinois.
In 1996 the state indicted seven DuPage County law enforcement officials for conspiracy to convict Cruz and wrongful prosecution.
They were acquitted but Cruz, Hernandez and Steven Buckley (one of the three original defendants) filed a civil suit against DuPage County.
Another man, Brian Dugan, already convicted of rape and murder of both a child and an adult woman in separate events, had claimed in 1985 to have committed the crime.
When Rolando Cruz, a 20-year-old known gang member from Aurora, approached the police with purported information about the murder, to claim the $10,000 reward, he became a person of interest because of his fabrications.
[2] Several weeks later, Alejandro Hernandez, a high-school dropout also from Aurora, came forward and said that three people had murdered Jeanine and that he knew two of them, Stephen Buckley and "Ricky".
The police took Buckley's boots (which he was wearing the day of the abduction of the girl) to compare with a print found on the front door of the house, which had been kicked in to gain entry.
John Gorajczyk, a shoe print examiner in the DuPage County police crime lab, concluded they did not match but never completed a report about this result.
Gorajczyk later said that lead prosecutor and Assistant State's Attorney Thomas Knight told him not to discuss the Buckley print not matching, nor the lack of his report.
At the joint trial of the three young men in 1987, two detectives testified that during an interview on May 9, 1983, Cruz had told them that he had had a vision about the Nicarico murder.
While in discussions on the plea deal, Dugan had told his attorney hypothetically that he was solely responsible for the rape and murder of Jeanine Nicarico, in an effort to avoid the death penalty.
The prosecution rejected his proposal, as they had not investigated him for this crime, and withheld this information about another suspect (Dugan) having confessed from being introduced at Cruz's trial.
As in the original trial, the prosecution case rested in part on the likelihood that two shoeprints below a window of the Nicarico home belonged to Hernandez or Cruz.
A crime lab technician for the DuPage County Sheriff's office, Paul Sahs, was due to testify to this at their retrials under separate prosecutions.
Assistant State's Attorney General Mary Brigid Kenney, who was assigned to defend against Cruz's appeal, sent a memo to Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris identifying her concern about numerous errors in the investigation and trial in Cruz's initial conviction, including "perjured testimony" and "fraudulent investigations by local officials".
He also said that DNA tests had excluded Cruz and his co-defendant, Alejandro Hernandez, as the contributors of the semen found at the crime scene.
Secondly, they said prosecutors had concealed Brian Dugan's confession while knowing that it included accurate, private details related to the crimes, which indicated that he had committed the deeds.
[3] According to the Chicago Tribune in 2007, the case against the DuPage law enforcement officials established a legal benchmark in getting to trial, as it is highly unusual for prosecutors to be prosecuted for their actions in office.
[16] The public outcry from the Cruz case resulted in Governor George Ryan declaring a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, asserting that the system was "fraught with error.