Aleman v. Honorable Judges of Circuit Court of Cook County

• Decision Date: 06 March 1998
• Docket Number: No. 97-2479,97-2479
• Citation: 138 F.3d 302
• Parties: Harry ALEMAN, Petitioner-Appellant, v. THE HONORABLE JUDGES OF THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, Criminal Division, Illinois, Honorable Michael P. Toomin, Judge Presiding, Honorable Richard Devine, State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois, Ernesto Velasco, Executive Director, Cook County Department of Corrections, Respondents-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 302

138 F.3d 302

Harry ALEMAN, Petitioner-Appellant, v. THE HONORABLE JUDGES OF THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY Criminal Division, Illinois, Honorable Michael P. Toomin Judge Presiding, Honorable Richard Devine, State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois, Ernesto Velasco, Executive Director, Cook County Department of Corrections Respondents-Appellees.

No. 97-2479.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued Dec. 2, 1997.

Decided March 6, 1998.

Allan A. Ackerman, Chicago, IL, David I. Bruck (argued), Columbia, SC, for Harry Aleman.

Rita M. Novak, Office of the Attorney General, Chicago, IL, James E. Fitzgerald, John Blakey, Cook County State's Attorney, Chicago, IL, Renee G. Goldfarb (argued), Office of the State's Attorney of Cook County, Criminal Appeals Divison, Chicago, IL, for Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, Criminal Division, Michael P. Toomin, Judge, and Ernesto Velasco.

James E. Fitzgerald, John Blakey, Cook County State's Attorney, Chicago, IL, Renee G. Goldfarb (argued), Office of the State's Attorney of Cook County, Criminal Appeals Division, Chicago, IL, for Richard A. Devine.

Before WOOD, Jr., COFFEY, and FLAUM, Circuit Judges.

FLAUM, Circuit Judge.

Harry Aleman successfully bribed a Cook County Circuit Judge to acquit him of a murder charge in a 1977 bench trial. A grand jury returned a second indictment against Aleman on this murder charge in 1993 after evidence of the bribery surfaced. In addition, Aleman was indicted for the first time on a different murder charge. Aleman moved to dismiss both indictments, but the Illinois state courts rejected his arguments. In a lastditch effort to avoid (re)trial, Aleman requested a stay of state court proceedings while a federal district court considered his challenge to the indictments in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The case proceeded to trial after the district court denied this petition and motion to stay, and a Cook County jury convicted him of the Logan murder; ¹ the trial judge thereafter sentenced Aleman to 100-300 years in prison. Aleman appeals the district court's denial of the petition. His conviction will stand, though, because we affirm the district court's denial of Aleman's petition.

I. BACKGROUND

While walking to work on the morning of September 27, 1972, William Logan was shot and killed by Harry Aleman. Three years later, in October 1975, Aleman also shot and killed Anthony Reitinger, allegedly because Reitinger neglected to pay a "street tax" ² on his bookmaking operation to local organized crime figures. A grand jury indicted Aleman for the Logan murder in December 1976, but he was not charged at this time with the Reitinger murder. After numerous substitutions of counsel and judges, the Logan case proceeded to a bench trial before Cook County Circuit Court Judge Frank Wilson, who acquitted Aleman of the Logan murder in May 1977.

Nearly twenty years after the trial, however, two witnesses from the Federal Witness Protection Program were made available to testify that Aleman had murdered both Logan and Reitinger and that he had purchased the Logan acquittal with a $10,000 bribe to Judge Wilson. The first witness, Vincent Rizza, was a former Chicago police officer who ran an illegal bookmaking operation in order to supplement his government salary. Rizza paid a street tax to the local mafia and agreed to report bookmakers who were not making such payments to Aleman; one of the independent bookmakers whom Rizza offered up to Aleman was Anthony Reitinger. This evidence would provide a crucial link between Aleman and Reitinger's unsolved murder.

Rizza also supplied corroboration of Aleman's bribe of Judge Wilson in the Logan murder trial. In the early winter of 1977, after Aleman's indictment but before the trial, Aleman told Rizza that the trial was "all taken care of". Aleman said that he requested a bench trial "because the case was all taken care of" and that this way he was not going to jail. Later, when newspaper accounts began to paint a bleak picture of Aleman's chances of gaining an acquittal, he again told Rizza calmly that the case was "taken care of".

The second federal government informant was Robert Cooley, a former lawyer steeped in corruption who admitted that he frequently bribed judges, prosecutors, clerks, and sheriffs before entering the Federal Witness Protection Program. ³ Cooley was a close friend of Judge Wilson and, at the request of some local organized crime figures, pitched the idea of a "fix" to Wilson. Cooley told Wilson that the case against Aleman was weak, that it could be handled very easily, and that an acquittal would be worth $10,000. Wilson agreed to fix the case if Aleman's counsel, Thomas Maloney, a good friend of Wilson's, would withdraw from the case in order to reduce the appearance of impropriety. ⁴ Cooley thereupon paid Wilson $2,500, and the two men agreed that Wilson would receive the remaining $7,500 after the acquittal. Unbeknownst to Wilson, Cooley had also arranged a $10,000 payment to secure the favorable testimony of an eyewitness to the murder. Cooley then met with Aleman and assured him that an acquittal was guaranteed.

The evidence against Aleman, however, was not as flimsy as Cooley had indicated to Judge Wilson. After the second day of trial, Cooley met with Wilson, who was upset at Cooley's misrepresentations and at the prosecutor's allegations that a witness had received $10,000 in exchange for offering false testimony. Amazingly, the issue for Wilson was not whether he would still acquit Aleman, but for how much. Wilson expressed annoyance that a witness was getting the same amount of money as a "full circuit judge"; he said to Cooley that he would "receive all kinds of heat" for the acquittal and requested more bribe money: "[T]hat's all I get is ten thousand dollars? I think I deserve more."

Throughout these meetings, the acquittal itself was never in question. Judge Wilson fulfilled his end of the bargain on May 24, 1977, when he acquitted Aleman in a brisk oral ruling and quickly exited the courtroom. Cooley's contacts in organized crime gave him a $3,000 "commission" for his work and an envelope containing $7,500 for Judge Wilson. Cooley and Wilson dined together at a restaurant soon after the trial, and, in the men's room, Cooley slipped Wilson the promised $7,500 envelope. Wilson expressed concern because the press was "all over" him about the seemingly inexplicable acquittal; he complained to Cooley: "That's all I'm going to get? I don't get any more than that?" Wilson then left the restaurant in frustration.

In addition to this extraordinary informant testimony, other evidence confirmed the bribery. An F.B.I. agent interviewed Judge Wilson at his retirement home in Arizona in November 1989. The agent informed Wilson that Cooley had become a government informant, that Cooley had secretly taped a recent conversation with Wilson in which the two men discussed the $10,000 Aleman bribe, and that the Government was currently investigating allegations that Wilson accepted a bribe to acquit Aleman. Wilson denied the accusations, but he failed to appear in Chicago for a grand jury subpoena concerning the matter on December 6, 1989. A few months later, Judge Wilson walked into the backyard of his home and shot himself to death.

Finally, Monte Katz, a friend of Aleman's in federal prison, ⁵ claimed that Aleman admitted that he murdered William Logan. Katz and Aleman became friends in prison, and, apparently, Aleman often discussed his criminal exploits. Specifically, Aleman told Katz that he "fixed" the Logan trial by paying money to "reach" the judge. Aleman stated that he was not worried about being tried again for the murder because it "was a double jeopardy situation."

The Circuit Court noted that the circumstantial evidence of a bribe was also significant. The record revealed "the rather curious spectacle" of Aleman, who originally deemed Judge Wilson to be a prejudiced judge, within the passage of ten weeks, withdrawing his objection and allowing the case to be assigned to Wilson. In addition, Aleman was released from state custody on bond despite facing the state's most serious criminal charge, and the case proceeded to trial in less than five months from the date of his arraignment. The Circuit Court also took pause from the fact that Aleman's attorney, Frank Whalen, set the case for trial within six weeks of filing his appearance and requested no interim continuances to conduct the "adequate preparation one might reasonably anticipate in a case of this magnitude."

Based on this body of evidence, in December 1993, the Cook County State's Attorney again charged Aleman for the Logan murder and for the first time charged Aleman with the murder of Reitinger. A grand jury returned indictments on both counts. Aleman claimed to the Circuit Court, as he claims to us on appeal, that the Logan indictment violated the Double Jeopardy Clause and that the prejudicial pre-indictment delay on both charges violated his due process rights. After an evidentiary hearing concerning the alleged bribe, the Circuit Court rejected the double jeopardy argument based on the overwhelming factual evidence that Aleman's first trial was a sham. The Court emphasized its certainty that Aleman had bribed Judge Wilson:

Although the court earlier observed that the State's burden was to establish the bribery by a preponderance of the evidence, the court also concurs in the State's appraisal that the evidence presented also meets the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Were this a prosecution for the substantive offense of bribery, the court would have little difficulty in concluding that the People had presented a credible and coherent case against the defendant. The evidence clearly establishes the tendering of money to a public officer to influence him in the performance of his duties.

(Citations omitted). Based on this factual...