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              2005. He pled guilty and
appeared before a death
penalty jury in November of
2009. His lawyers then did
something that had never
before been done in a crimi-nal
trial.
Dr. Kent Kiehl is a New
Mexico researcher who uses
a portable fMRI device to
study prisoners. It was the
opinion of defense experts
that Dugan was a psycho-path.
While this does not
sound like a promising ave-nue
for mitigation, Dugan‟s
lawyers had a new way to
put it in perspective for the
jury: neuroimaging.
On the team was CTAU
lawyer Allan Sincox.
Cont. page 3
By Tim Capps, Staff Attorney
The threads of the Jeanine
Nicarico murder case are
too tangled for any but the
briefest summary here. In
1983 Jeanine was abducted
from her DuPage County
home, raped and murdered.
Police developed suspicions
about three men, two of
whom — Rolando Cruz
and Alejandro Hernandez
— were convicted and sen-tenced
to death in 1985.
Later that year a man
named Brian Dugan, himself
a murderer, confessed to
the Nicarico murder.
Nonetheless, the Cruz and
Hernandez cases wound
their way through the
courts over the next ten
years. All this time police,
prosecutors and even then-
Attorney General Roland
Burris resisted public pres-sure
to investigate Dugan.
When the courts were done
with the original cases in
1995, Cruz and Hernandez
were free (sharing $3.5
million settlement dollars
with the third original de-fendant),
police and prose-cutors
were charged with
conspiracy, and ground-work
had been laid for Gov-ernor
Ryan‟s death penalty
moratorium.
Brian Dugan was finally
indicted for the murder in
NEUROIMAGING DEBUTS IN ILLINOIS COURT
VIOLENT CRIME LINKED TO LEAD PAINT
By Shannon Keyes Woodward,
Staff Mitigator
The adverse effects of lead
exposure in children, in-cluding
lower IQ levels and
delayed development, have
been well documented.
Now, research has shown
toxic exposure to lead as a
child can be directly linked
to criminal behavior, espe-cially
violent crime.
Impulsivity is a common
effect of lead exposure.
“Impulsivity means you ig-nore
the consequences of
what you do,” says Univer-sity
of Pittsburgh professor
Herbert Needleman, an
expert on lead exposure.
“Lead decreases the ability
to tell yourself „if I do this, I
will go to jail.‟” Risk fac-tors
include living in older
or low-income housing,
especially in certain zip
codes. (A complete list of
Cont. page 2
OSAD CAPITAL TRIAL ASSISTANCE UNIT
ISSUE 3 SPRING, 2010
THE ILLINOIS LIFELINE
Psychopathy — a con-dition
marked by a
lack of empathy.
Psychopaths have
been described as
“intraspecies preda-tors,”
and do not ex-perience
shame,
guilt or remorse,
even though they
know what these are.
“They know the
words, but not the
music,” according to
Dr. Kiehl.
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
MAJOR NEW
CASES
2
DEATH PENALTY
SPRING SEMINAR
3
CTAU PROFILE:
JOHN PRICE
3
AUTISM & THE
CAPITAL DEFEN-DANT
4
AUTISTIC DEFEN-DANT
SPARED
4
ABOUT US &
CONTACT INFO
6
fMRIs fail to persuade a
DuPage Co. jury to
spare Brian Dugan.
Mitigation
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