Just back from a vacation, Chicago's U.S. District Judge Joseph Sam Perry dealt quickly with a couple of routine items on his docket one morning last week. Then he turned to major business: Case No. 63-C-1426, that of Lloyd Eldon Miller Jr. Last month the Supreme Court reversed the 1956 conviction of Cab Driver Miller for the rape-murder of an eight-year-old girl near the Fulton County city of Canton, Ill. It was up to Judge Perry to answer the next question: Did the state have any basis for keeping Miller in custody?
Judge Perry listened to arguments from both sides. Then he announced: "Petitioner should not be compelled to stand trial again." And he added: "Here's a man who's been in the shadow of death for ten years. I don't know but what the punishment that he has suffered has been worse than death itself. Based upon the record as the Supreme Court analyzed it and as I heard the evidence, it would be impossible ever to convict the defendant."
Miller's father, sitting in the courtroom, wept. Then he and his wife drove to Stateville Penitentiary. After ten years, during which he had faced execution ten separate times, their son, now 40, walked through the gates pulling a handcart piled with his possessions.
Blood-Stained Pants. Miller's ordeal began two days after the brutal crime incensed Canton on a Saturday afternoon in November 1955. Because he had left town Saturday night in one of his boss's cabs, the police suspected Miller and prodded his confused girl friend, Waitress Betty Baldwin, to sign a statement implicating him. After he was arrested, Miller was held incommunicado for 52 hours, denied counsel and told that one of his pubic hairs had been found in the child's vagina. The police assured him that he was mentally ill and would go to a hospital if he confessed. They wrote his confession, and though he later recanted, it was deemed "voluntary" and used against him.
As physical evidence at the 1956 trial, Fulton County Prosecutor Blaine Ramsey presented a pair of "bloodstained" underpants that police had found one mile from the scene of the crime. The judge refused to let defense chemists analyze the pants, nor did Miller try them on. Miller usually wore boxer-type shorts; these were jockey type, and looked too small for Miller. But with those shorts, Miller's confession and his girl friend's testimony, Ramsey won the case hands down.
For seven years, the case bounced through nine appeals in state and federal courts. The strain was so great on Miller, who could only sit and wait on death row, that he was twice transferred to the psychiatric ward. Seven and a half hours before he was scheduled to be electrocuted in 1963, Miller won a stay for a federal habeas corpus hearing before Judge Perry, who heard testimony that raised troubling questions about the evidence in the 1956 trial.