Four Men Are Exonerated of Murder and Kidnapping After Five Years of False Imprisonment When the Prosecution's Lone Witness Is Indicted For Framing Them

By Hans Sherrer

For Justice Denied Magazine (March 2, 2003)

Introduction:

Four men received their best ever Christmas present a week early on December 18, 2002. In a Chicago courtroom prosecutors admitted the men were innocent of murder and kidnapping charges related to a 1997 murder they had been wrongly convicted of committing.

In July 1997, 56 year old furniture dealer Sindulfo Miranda was kidnapped, tortured and murdered on Chicago’s North Side. Four months after the murder, police investigators thought the case was solved when an informant, Miguel LaSalle, gave them the names of five men he said committed the crime. ¹ The five men fingered by LaSalle were Robert Gayol, Omar Aguirre, Edar Duarte Santos, Luis Ortiz and Ronnie Gamboa. ² LaSalle claimed he heard the five men plotting to kill Miranda at Ronny’s Bar in Chicago, that he saw Miranda with the men the night he was killed, and that Santaos talked with him on his cell phone while the crime was occuring. ³ The five men were rounded up on November 7, 1997, and they all protested their innocence to the deaf ears of the Chicago police and prosectutors.

Four of the men went to trial. One of them, Ronnie Gamboa, the owner of Ronny’s Bar, was acquitted. The other three were convicted. In 1999 Aguirre was convicted of Miranda's murder and sentenced to 55 years in prison. He was convicted on the basis of LaSalle’s testimony and his alleged confession to police interrogators. Aguirre's denial he confessed to the murder and did not sign a confession was supported by the fact the alleged confession was written entirely in English, while he only reads and writes Spanish, and the signature on it didn’t appear to match his. ⁴ Ortiz was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. In exchange for a sentence reduction to 25 years he agreed to plead guilty to murder and testify against Gayol. ⁵ After his conviction in 2001, Gayol was sentenced to life in prison. ⁶

After spending over three years in the Cook County Jail awaiting trial, in February 2002 the last of the five men fingered by LaSalle, his former tenant Edar Duarte Santos, pled guity to aggravated kidnapping in exchange for a 12 year sentence. ⁷

In the course of investigating drug related kidnappings and torture/murders in the Chicago area, the FBI discovered evidence that Sindulfo Miranda’s murder was one of a series of similar crimes committed by the Latin Kings street gang. ⁸ They also established that the five men fingered by LaSalle had nothing to do either with the Latin Kings or Miranda’s murder.

On December 18, 2002 state prosecutors appeared before a Cook County judge and admitted that Robert Gayol, Omar Aguirre, Edar Duarte Santos and Luis Ortiz were innocent of Sindulfo Miranda’s murder. Aguirre and Santos were ordered immediately released on bail, while Gayol and Ortiz continued to be held in custody on other unrelated charges. ⁹

Cook County State's Attorney Richard Devine tried to deflect criticism of the Chicago police and the prosecutors and mitigate possible damage awards to the men for their role in causing the men's five-year plight, by making making misstatements and omitting important points when discussing the case. ¹⁰Among other things:

* He blamed the innocent men for their wrongful convictions.

* He mentioned that two of the men pled guilty to crimes they didn't commit, without explaining the pressures put on them by the police and prosecutors to do so, such as that Santos spent more than four years in the Cook County Jail awaiting trial.

* He falsely stated Aguirre’s lawyer didn’t challenge his alleged confession, which she not only did, but which is now known with absolute certainty wasn’t worth the paper it was fabricated on by the police. ¹¹

* He claimed law enforcement officials should be commended for doing “the right thing” of acknowledging the men's innocence, implying prosecutors were doing the innocent men a favor, and not their job, by supporting their exoneration. ¹²

* He failed to mention the men’s wrongful convictions were caused by the failure of the Chicago police to thoroughly investigate both Miranda’s murder and LaSalle’s claim the five men were involved in it, and that the prosecutors didn’t insist that they do so.

* He failed to mention that without the FBI driving a reinvestigation of Miranda’s murder – the four men’s innocence would have been concealed forever and the men would have served out their sentences.

* He also failed to mention that he knew the men were innocent for six weeks before acting on it, so he caused Aguirre and Santos to spend the Thanksgiving holiday wrongly imprisoned instead of with their families at home where they belonged. ¹³

His credibility in taters after his statement about the Miranda case, one wonders how anyone can seriously take anything State's Attorney Devine ever says again.

It is not known at this time why LaSalle, who now lives in Florida, fingered the five men. Regardless of the pressures on LaSalle to finger someone to the police about the Miranda murder, it was really bad luck for Santos that in November 1997 he was LaSalle’s tenant, and that the five men made convenient patsies because LaSalle was aware they knew each other.

The same day state prosecutors publicly recognized the four men's innocence, the U.S. Attorney for Chicago announced the indictment of Miguel LaSalle for making false statements to federal officers implicating the five innocent men (including the acquitted Ronnie Gamboa) in Miranda’s kidnapping and death. ¹⁴ At the same time he also announced that three men believed to be Miranda's killers were federally indicted on murder, drug and other charges. ¹⁵ Six other members of the gang those three belong to were also indicted on a variety of charges. ¹⁶

Sindulfo Miranda's actual killers were protected for more than five years by LaSalle's fingering of the five innocent men. Unfortunately for those men the Chicago police and state prosecutors uncritically accepted LaSalle's frame-up as the truth. Those authorities then used their factually baseless presumption the men were guilty to justify forging Omar Aguirre's alleged confession, to pressure Luis Ortiz to perjure himself by testifying against Robert Gayol, and to extract guilty pleas out of Edar Duarte Santos and Luis Ortiz to crimes they didn't commit. ¹⁷

Omar Aguirre declined to talk with reporters after his release from prison on December 18th. Duarte Santos made only a brief statement before leaving with two carloads of family and friends that were waiting for him as he walked out of prison, "There were five Christmases that I missed with my family. This one is going to be special, it's such a great blessing." ¹⁸

THE END

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