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With no lawyer to advise him, Danny fell into a well-laid legal trap. Confronted with Di Gerlando, Danny blurted: "You did it!"—thus indirectly admitting his own complicity. To shut the trap tighter, a detective then allegedly promised Danny that a full statement would free him, Grace and Chan. After several hours, said police, Danny implicated Grace and stated that he had offered Di Gerlando $500 to kill Grace's husband, and that Chan had been the lookout. Di Gerlando later charged that his confession was beaten out of him. The police denied it; he was convicted, is still serving a life sentence.
Far from being freed, as the detective had promised, Danny, Grace and Chan were all indicted for murder. Under Illinois law, Danny's admission made each as culpable as if each had admitted pulling the trigger. Grace was later acquitted for lack of clear links to the crime, and the charges against Chan were dropped. As for Danny, although he recanted his statement, the trial judge ruled it voluntary, dismissed his handcuffing as "ordinary police procedure," and sentenced him to 20 years.
Fair's Fair. After two years in Statesville, which he remembers as all "whistles, bells and men in brown," Danny filed a pauper's appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, which duly appointed an able young Chicago lawyer named Eugene Farrug to handle his case for no fee. On first meeting his scrawny client, Farrug felt immediate compassion: "He looked so small and helpless. There was the enormity of the prison, the towering guards, the prison clothes a little too big for him." Danny himself could hardly believe the earnest stranger's promise that "you have the whole American tradition of law and justice behind you." From his side of the bars, he could only smile skeptically at one of Farrug's letters: "It's a pretty great thing to live in a society where people will work so hard to ensure that one individual is not taken advantage of."
To his astonishment, Danny soon learned that Lawyer Farrug had told the exact truth. While polishing Danny's petition, Farrug enlisted the best appellate advocate he could find: Barry Kroll, 28, who had joined Farrug's Chicago firm after arguing 300 military appeals cases in the Army. In 1962, "starting the best experience I've ever had," the brilliant young Kroll urged the Illinois Supreme Court to reverse Danny's conviction, which it did on the grounds of false promises by the detective who persuaded Danny to talk.
At a rehearing, though, the state pointed out that the detective had denied the promises, and the court reversed itself. Kroll vainly argued a new theory: that Danny's statement became ipso facto involuntary, and therefore inadmissible, as soon as the police turned away his lawyer. Kroll hoped to end "swearing contests" on the voluntariness of confessions by establishing an objective test: if police violate a specific rule, any confession they elicit is automatically excluded. Kroll's proposed rule was the Illinois statute guaranteeing access to a lawyer. But the court recoiled from enforcing it: such a