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.
Source: chicagotribune.com, Robert McCoppin, July 27, 2020. Robert McCoppin reports on news and trends in Chicago's suburbs, focusing especially on the legalization of marijuana. Having worked at the City News Bureau and Daily Herald before joining the Tribune in 2010, he has covered crime, the courts, flooding, and health, and has won multiple Chicago Headline Club awards.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde