http://www.southernillinoisan.com/re...op/TOP002.html
SUTHERLAND GUILTY IN RETRIAL FOR CHILD'S 1987 MURDER
[Fri Jun 11 2004]
BELLEVILLE (AP) -- A man who spent more than a decade on death row for the 1987 rape and murder of a 10-year-old Southern Illinois girl was convicted for a second time Friday in a retrial ordered by the state Supreme Court.
A St. Clair County jury convicted Cecil Sutherland, 49, on all five counts in the rape and death of Amy Schulz.
Jefferson County State's Attorney Gary Duncan said prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
Sutherland, a former tire-factory worker, was sentenced to die in 1989 after he was convicted the first time of abducting Amy from the small town of Kell, raping and strangling her and cutting her throat. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in 2000 that prosecutors went too far in linking hair and fiber evidence to Sutherland, said he had a weak defense, and ordered a new trial.
"We initially had 12 people who found him guilty, now we have 24," the girl's father, Dennis Schulz, told the Belleville News-Democrat outside the courtroom Friday.
The jury of eight women and four men deliberated for about eight hours Thursday and Friday before announcing the verdict. They found Sutherland guilty on three counts of first-degree murder and one count each of aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping.
Sutherland showed no emotion while the judge read the verdict, which drew sobs from the girl's family, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Defense attorneys had tried during the six-week trial to turn the focus on Schulz's step-grandfather, William Willis, a convicted sex offender.
Willis, 53, acknowledged during his testimony that he has a history of sexually abusing minors, including pleading guilty to molesting a Boy Scout in 1994. But he said he was never attracted to little girls and never molested Amy.
Prosecutors said Willis was excluded as the killer by hair and fiber evidence that were consistent with Sutherland's.
Duncan, who was not involved in the first trial, said the evidence had been bolstered by DNA technology that was not available in the 1980s.
Sutherland's defense attorney, former Chicago homicide detective John Paul Carroll, argued that the prosecution's mitochondrial DNA tests aren't as definitive as nuclear DNA tests.
Amy's death outraged the community, which created a child-advocacy center named in her honor.
The trial was moved out of Jefferson County because of extensive news coverage of the case in the Mount Vernon area.