In February 1983, a 10 year-old girl named Jeannine Nicarico was kidnapped from her home in Naperville, Illinois.

Two days after the kidnapping her body was found six miles away from her home. The little girl had been raped and killed. Police spent months investigating the murder without any leads. Then a reward was offered for any information leading to the killer. Soon after, a man named Alejandro Hernandez came to the police and claimed he knew who had killed the girl. He mentioned a petty criminal named Rolando Cruz. Cruz was brought in by the police, and when questioned stated that he had heard on the street that Jeannine had been killed in a certain house. The police obtained a warrant for the house. Meanwhile Mr. Hernandez offered the police the names of people he thought were suspects. One person he only knew as "Ricky", and another acquaintance named Stephen Buckley. "Ricky" was never found, but Mr. Buckley was. Mr. Buckley gave his boots to police so that they could compare them with a boot print that was on the front door of the Nicarico's house, as well as footprints that were found outside of the house. Soon after Cruz, Hernandez, and Buckley were arrested and indicted for the murder of Jeannine Nicarico. As the trial was being prepared, Buckley's boot prints were compared to those at the crime scene. The sheriff's criminologist found that the prints didn't match and reported his findings to the sheriff. The sheriff told his criminologist not to tell anyone and not to write a report. The prosecutor then sent the boot prints to the Illinois Crime Lab for analysis. The most the crime lab would say was that the results were inconclusive. In a final desperate action, the prosecutor sent the prints to a shoe "expert" in North Carolina. This expert claimed that not only were the prints were a match, but that she could tell the height and the race of the person wearing the boot. Right before trial, the prosecutor claimed a breaking development. Two sheriff's detectives claimed that many months earlier, Cruz had told them about a dream he had about Jeannine's murder. The detectives said that Cruz told them that he dreamt that Jeannine's nose had been broken and that her face had hit the ground so hard that it had left an indentation. This would be the most important evidence in the trial, yet there was absolutely no documentation of it. The detectives didn't bother to write a report about the supposed confession, and apparently they just let Cruz walk away after he told them of his dream. At trial, the defense tried to block testimony of the trial, but was unsuccessful. The jury was unsure about the boot print evidence, so Buckley walked. Hernandez and Cruz were convicted

and sentenced to die. However, on appeal the Illinois Supreme Court stated that the two should have been tried separately, so their sentences were vacated and they were sent back for new trials. Before testifying at the Hernandez trial, a crime technician told the prosecutor that he had been in contact with a Nike shoe company representative. Apparently the footprints outside the house were made by a woman's size six Nike shoe. So the footprints couldn't possibly have belonged to Cruz or Hernandez. When put on the stand, the prosecutor did not ask the technician any questions about shoe size or likely gender, and the defense was never told of the information. Six months after Cruz and Hernandez were tried, a pedophile named Brian Dugan had been arrested for sexual assault not far from where Jeannine had been found. In order to avoid the death penalty, he confessed to other crimes, including the rape and murder of Jeannine. DNA evidence would later show that Dugan was the attacker and that there was no evidence that Cruz and Hernandez were involved. Even with all this information, the police and prosecutors kept pushing the case forward. Two investigators quit the Sheriff's Department in protest. When Hernandez and Cruz appealed their convictions, the person at the Attorney General's office who supposed argue against the appeal refused to do so. When the time came for the third trial, the prosecution once again introduced the "dream" evidence. This time, the detectives claimed that they had told their lieutenant about what Cruz had said. The lieutenant corroborated the story until he discovered that he had been in Florida at the time Cruz had told the detectives about his dream. Once the judge had heard this, he claimed that enough was enough. He dropped the case against Cruz. Afterward, a special prosecutor was assigned to investigate the handling of the Nicarico case. After a thorough investigation, three prosecutors and four sheriff's investigators were indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Unfortunately, all were eventually acquitted. In order to reign in overzealous prosecutors and investigators, the law should allow them to be sued for intentional misconduct. Also, panels should be set up to investigate complaints against

prosecutors, and federal prosecutors should be held to ethics rules. These steps are necessary in order to remind prosecutors and police investigators that they are not above the law.