Restart of federal death penalty has implications for two in state

The Justice Department’s decision this week to resume executions for the first time since 2003 has implications for two death row inmates with connections to Illinois.

Dr. Ronald Mikos has been on death row since 2006 following his conviction for killing a federal grand jury witness during a Medicare fraud investigation. Mikos was the last person sentenced to death in Illinois.

Ex-Marine Jorge Torrez was sentenced to 100 years in prison last September for the brutal Mother’s Day 2005 slayings of 8-year-old Laura Hobbs and 9-yearold Krystal Tobias in Zion. Torrez was already on death row after being sentenced in 2014 in Virginia for killing a fellow service member.

Jerry Hobbs, Laura’s father, had previously confessed to the girls’ murder and spent nearly five years in Lake County jail before he was exonerated in 2010 by DNA evidence that pointed to Torrez.

Illinois abolished capital punishment in 2011, 11 years after a moratorium was put on the practice, but it remains an option in federal cases for about 60 crimes ranging from murder to treason.

Jurors earlier this month were asked to consider the death penalty for Brendt Christensen, who had been convicted of killing a Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The jury couldn’t come to a decision and a federal judge sentenced Christensen to life in prison.

The Justice Department’s decision to resume executing death row inmates for the first time since 2003 ended an informal moratorium, even as the nation sees a broad shift away from capital punishment.

Attorney General William Barr instructed the Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions starting in December for five men, all accused of murdering children. Although the death penalty remains legal in 30 states, executions on the federal level are rare.

The government has put to death only three people since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988, the most recent of which occurred in 2003.

In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.

That review has been completed, Barr said Thursday, and it has cleared the way for executions to resume.

Barr approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug cocktail previously used in federal execution with a single drug, pentobarbital.

Some other facts about the federal death penalty:

■ From 1927 to 2003, the U.S. government executed 37 people. Among the most high-profile cases was Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, in 2001, and Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in 1953. No executions were carried out from 1963 to 2001.

■ The last federal prisoner put to death was Louis Jones, a Gulf War veteran convicted of kidnapping and murdering a female soldier. Jones was executed March 18, 2003. The appeals process for death row inmates can be expected to last at least a decade, usually more, according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Thirteen people have had their sentences overturned and been removed from death row since 1994.

■ There are 61 people on the federal death row, according to Death Row USA, a quarterly report of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Of the prisoners, roughly 44 percent are white, 42 percent are black and 11 percent are Latino. Two prisoners have been on death row since 1993. Only one death row inmate is a woman.

■ Mikos is the only death row inmate whose crime was committed in Illinois. Thirteen of those on death row were sentenced in Texas; followed by Missouri (eight) and Virginia (seven). Others on death row include Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death in 2015 in a federal trial in Massachusetts — a state which also has banned the practice at the state level.

Sources: The Associated Press, Federal Bureau of Prisons; Death Penalty Information Center, Tribune archives.