Slain kids

Slain kids' mom has 2nd chance to get clemency
By Eric Zorn
Tribune columnist
Published February 18, 2003

In an unusual and timely move, the chairman of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board has waived a one-year waiting requirement and invited Debra Gindorf to reapply immediately for executive clemency.

Gindorf, 38, has been behind bars since she was 20 and killed her two children--a 23-month-old daughter and 3-month-old son--in their apartment in suburban Zion. She fed them sleeping medication as part of a suicide attempt that marked the hideous depths of a post-partum mental disturbance.

At the time, as I wrote in a column on Gindorf last month, the gravity of post-partum depression and psychosis were poorly understood by the medical and legal communities. In 1985, Gindorf received a sentence of life in prison without parole, though women in similar distress who've killed their children in recent years have received at most 2 years in prison.

It's hard to find anyone who thinks Gindorf should still be locked up. The Lake County state's attorney's office did not send a representative or write a letter to object when Gindorf made an uncontested application for mercy to the Prisoner Review Board last April. In fact, one of Gindorf's strongest advocates was the Highland Park psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution at her trial.

Gindorf's life sentence "was a miscarriage of justice," wrote Dr. Ronald Baron in a letter to then-Gov. George Ryan. "This is a special situation, which needs your humanitarian touch to correct."

Ryan didn't think so. In the flurry of Death Row pardons and commutations at the end of his term, he declined to release Gindorf. Any idea that Ryan was simply too busy addressing condemned prisoners to deal with lesser cases was belied when we learned at the end of January of more 150 other pardons and commutations Ryan signed on his way out the door.

What did the Prisoner Review Board recommend in Gindorf's case? Its findings are confidential, but board Chairman Craig Findley recently all but gave the answer when he asked Gindorf to file a new petition right away.

Findley, a former Republican state representative, was emphatic during our conversation that Gindorf "has a case that deserves to be reheard."

Under normal circumstances, petitioners who are denied by the governor must wait one year from the date of denial to refile. In Gindorf's case, this would have meant next January.

The chairman customarily waives that waiting period only when there is a "substantial change of circumstance," said board attorney Ken Tupy, such as when new evidence surfaces or a prisoner is diagnosed with a rapidly progressing fatal illness.

This waiver for Gindorf is unusual if not unprecedented because the only change of circumstance for her is the name of the man in the governor's mansion.

And the waiver is timely, Findley said, "because of our heightened awareness of post-partum psychosis," an awareness Findley noted was raised further by Tribune reporter Louise Kiernan's two-part series Sunday and Monday "that put a human face on how awful this disorder is."

Kiernan chronicled in searing detail the rampaging mental disorders of Jennifer Mudd Houghtaling and Melanie Stokes. Both women were healthy when they gave birth for the first time in mid-2001; then, despite the best efforts of their husbands, families and doctors to treat the subsequent neurological imbalances, both women committed suicide.

Gindorf, in contrast, had no psychiatrist in 1985, no job, no car and no phone, and was living with two children under age 2 in a tiny apartment in Zion. She was also estranged from her family and her physically abusive, alcoholic husband.

Now we know why and how the dark storm overtook her. Now we know that it's time to understand and forgive

Gov. Rod Blagojevich can make Gindorf wait a few more months at Dwight Correctional Center so the lawyers and the Prisoner Review Board can go through the formalities of holding another hearing in early April and generate another official recommendation.

Or he can ask the board members for their opinion--they're his confidential advisers, after all--and act to free her today.

Such bold acts of justice are rare early in a governor's term. But one unusual and timely move deserves another.