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  1. #1
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Ronald Alan Mikos - Federal Death Row






    Summary of Offense:

    On May 23, 2005, a jury recommended a death sentence for the then 56-year-old Chicago podiatrist who was convicted of fatally shooting Joyce Brannon, a former patient, to prevent her from testifying in a federal probe of a Medicare fraud scheme in January 2002.

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    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    August 27, 2008

    CHICAGO (AP) - A federal appeals court panel has upheld the death penalty for a Chicago foot doctor convicted in 2005 of killing a disabled patient to keep her from testifying against him in a Medicare fraud case.

    In Monday's ruling, the three-member panel of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the evidence was strong that Ronald Mikos (MEE'-kos) murdered Joyce Brannon and engaged in witness-tampering.

    The court dismissed some of Mikos' arguments, including his contention that federal agents didn't have the legal right to take weapons and ammo from his storage unit.

    One of the three judges did dissent on the question of sentencing, arguing that Mikos was entitled to a new death penalty hearing.

    Source

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    October 5, 2009

    Supreme Court lets stand death penalty for podiatrist

    The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to overturn the conviction and death sentence of a Chicago-area podiatrist accused of killing a former patient to keep her testifying against him.

    Ronald Mikos had complained that prosecutors unfairly focused the jury's attention on the fact that he never took the stand on his own behalf.

    The high court did not comment today as it left his conviction and sentence in place.

    Mikos was facing charges of Medicare fraud in 2005 when he shot a disabled nurse and former patient, Joyce Brannon, to keep her from testifying against him.

    Mikos did not take the stand in his own defense during his trial. His lawyers said prosecutors told the jury his decision not to testify showed a lack of remorse for what he did. During the penalty phase, the jury said his lack of remorse contributed to the decision to sentence him to death.

    Mikos's lawyer said his silence did not show a lack of remorse and objected to the prosecution's tactic of using it against him.

    The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago had also upheld the sentence. The case is Mikos v. United States, 08-1280.

    http://archive.chicagobreakingnews.c...ence-case.html

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On October 4, 2010, Mikos filed a petition for post-conviction relief in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/ill...v06331/248161/

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    March 9, 2011

    The Chicago man still on Death Row despite Quinn’s moves

    Gov. Quinn’s landmark decisions to repeal the death penalty and commute death sentences to life in prison may have cleared out Illinois’ Death Row — but they did little to help a onetime Chicago doctor who remains condemned to death.

    Ronald Mikos, 62, still awaits execution after a 2005 conviction.

    That’s because the death penalty is still legal in the federal court system where he was tried.

    Mikos, a former podiatrist, was sentenced to death after he killed a disabled patient of his who was about to testify against him in a Medicare-fraud investigation in 2002.

    Along with 59 others, Mikos sits on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind., where federal executions are carried out.

    The last prisoner the federal government executed by lethal injection happened in 2003. Most notably, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in Terre Haute in 2001.

    U.S. Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke said the next execution is not scheduled at this time.

    Mikos’ lawyer, Barry Levenstam, said his client continues to appeal his conviction and sentence, something that could continue for years.

    Attorney Keith Spielfogel said his client, Manuel Uriarte, charged in a federal racketeering conspiracy in Chicago that involves murder, is death penalty eligible.

    And a major cooperator in an international terrorism case, David Headley, had faced death before he cooperated with prosecutors. Now Headley is expected to be a major witness at a May trial. His plea deal took the death penalty off the table.

    Headley’s lawyer, John Theis, who handles federal death cases in Illinois and elsewhere, said it’s rarely pursued in the district covering Chicago, but it’s done. A panel in Washington D.C. weighs a series of factors before it allows federal prosecutors to move forward.

    Theis said other states, including Michigan, continue to pursue death in federal court even though it’s outlawed in the state courts.

    “I think it does send a strong message to the U.S. Attorney’s office here that the people of Illinois, even though these are federal, the jurors and the people who make up the Northern District of Illinois have spoken,” Theis said. “I think it should be one more factor in pursuing the death penalty in a particular case.”

    http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/4...nns-moves.html

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Resumption of federal death penalty could affect two convicted murderers from Illinois

    When given the chance in court, Jorge Torrez never said he was sorry.

    He didn’t speak at his sentencing for the rape and murders of two young girls in Zion.

    And earlier, when sentenced for murder in a case in Virginia, he told the judge, “There’s nothing I want to say, your honor.”

    But his attorney in the Zion case, Jed Stone, believes there remains a spark of humanity in him. Stone believes that the death penalty he faces — for the Virginia crime — is fundamentally unjust.

    The recent imposition of the federal death penalty means Torrez, who grew up in Zion, once again is in line to be executed, along with one other man convicted of murder in Illinois, Richard Mikos.

    Torrez was convicted in state court of the murder of the two girls in Zion but doesn’t face the death penalty in that case because Illinois law prohibits capital punishment. Instead, Torrez faces execution under federal law for the murder of a Navy petty officer in Virginia.

    Last year, the Trump administration announced it would resume executing death row inmates for the first time since 2003, after an informal moratorium. This month, the Department of Justice used lethal injections on three convicts.

    They included a former white supremacist for his role in the murder of a family of three, a man convicted of the murders of a 16-year-old and an 80-year-old polio patient, and a man convicted of killing five people to hide his dealing of methamphetamine, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

    Despite the hundreds of murders that occur in Illinois annually, only Torrez and Mikos, who was convicted in federal court, are in line for lethal injection.

    Most murders are prosecuted under state law, which previously allowed for the execution of murderers such as serial killer John Wayne Gacy in 1994. But a Chicago Tribune investigation in 1999 found numerous problems with the application of the death penalty in the state and nationwide.

    In 2003, citing errors common in the capital punishment system, then-Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 inmates on death row, over the outraged objections of prosecutors and some victims’ survivors. In 2011, state lawmakers voted to abolish the death penalty.

    The Tribune found numerous cases that were based on historically unreliable jailhouse informants, coerced confessions and bogus forensic evidence. There also were case where Blacks were sentenced by all-white juries, and verdicts that were reversed by court rulings, often based on DNA evidence that proved someone else committed the crime.

    Just such a scenario occurred in the case of 8-year-old Laura Hobbs and 9-year-old Krystal Tobias, who were found stabbed to death in a park in Zion on Mother’s Day in 2005. After being interrogated over 24 hours Laura’s father, Jerry Hobbs, who had found the girls’ bodies and had a lengthy criminal history — including chasing a man with a chain saw — confessed, and was charged with the murders.

    Hobbs spent five years in jail awaiting trial, but was eventually freed after DNA evidence from semen in one of the victims was matched to Torrez.

    Torrez, now 31, lived two blocks from the park where the girls were found, and was friends with Krystal Tobias’ half-brother and often visited their house. After he graduated from high school in 2006, Torrez joined the Marines.

    He spent two years based in Japan, before being transferred to a Marine base in Arlington County, Virginia. It was in 2008 when a court hearing was held over tests revealing that DNA in the girls’ murders didn’t match Jerry Hobbs, but Lake County state’s attorneys continued to prosecute Hobbs for three more years, according to court records.

    In the meantime, in July 2009, Petty Officer Amanda Snell, 20, was found dead in the same barracks where Torrez lived.

    Authorities didn’t arrest Torrez until 2010, after he abducted two women, and raped and choked one of them and left her to die in a forest in the snow, prosecutors said. She crawled to safety and Torrez was finally arrested.

    A jury in 2014 convicted him of strangling Snell and sentenced him to death.

    After his arrest in Virginia, DNA linked him to the Zion killings, authorities said.

    In 2018, Torrez agreed to plead guilty to the murders of the girls in Zion and was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

    Lake County Judge Daniel Shanes said Torrez crime was “hatefully and shockingly evil,” and that he was beyond rehabilitation.

    As part of the deal, he was transferred from Red Onion State Prison in Virginia to the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, the same prison where Ryan had served time, and where two recent executions were carried out.

    Torrez’s former attorney, Stone, said there was no proof of it, but he believed Torrez had been abused as a child. He finds capital punishment “senseless.”

    “It’s simply a barbaric form of retribution, and we’re better creatures than that,” he said.

    U.S. Attorney Zachary Terwilliger said death was the only just outcome for Torrez.

    “Life in prison is simply not an adequate punishment for what he has done,” Terwilliger said in a written statement to the Tribune. “Torrez deserved to be sentenced to death when he was convicted nearly six years ago, and he still deserves that sentence today.”

    Fifty-nine prisoners are on the federal death row nationwide, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That includes only one in which the crime occurred in Illinois. That is Ronald Mikos, who was convicted in a largely circumstantial federal court case of killing a former patient who was cooperating in a Medicare fraud investigation of the former podiatrist.

    He was the last person sentenced to death in Illinois.

    Twenty-eight states still have the death penalty. Polls generally find that the majority of Americans favor capital punishment. Amnesty International reported that 56 countries executed people last year, with most occurring in China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...bza-story.html
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  7. #7
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    American Greed did an episode on Mikos back in 2007 which focuses more on his scam than the murder.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2012/07/31/Evid...Dr.-Mikos.html

    https://www.cnbc.com/id/100000099?&q...Ronald%20Mikos
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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