One appellate judge says she would throw out a Putnam County man’s murder conviction and sentence. But it takes two justices to do that, and the other two who considered Clifford Andersen’s case didn’t agree. The decision this week came too late to matter anyway, since the 71-year old Andersen died last month in a southern Illinois prison. His funeral service is scheduled for tomorrow.
Police found 62-year old Deborah Dewey’s body wrapped up in a shallow grave in Standard in 2016, three weeks after she’d gone missing. The investigation led to Andersen, her brother-in-law, who was accused of clubbing her in the head at her home in Ladd. Prosecutors said Dewey had given Andersen a lot of money to help him pay gambling debts. When her support stopped, he killed her so his wife would inherit the woman’s retirement fund and he could continue tapping the money.
His appellate court lawyer argued earlier this year that mistakes made during Andersen’s 2018 trial made the trial unfair. Justices Vicki Wright and Mary K. O’Brien disagreed. Their opinion says the mistakes individually were too small. Justice Mary McDade wrote a dissenting opinion that the mistakes collectively made Andersen’s trial unfair.
Among the purported mistakes: allowing evidence of the defendant’s and victim’s financial circumstances without directly linking her retirement account withdrawals to his debt payments, allowing hearsay statements from Andersen’s wife about his activities with other people, allowing testimony that the defendant was upset with someone he telephoned from jail while the subject matter of the call wasn’t presented, and allowing a truck stop employee to describe the defendant as a nuisance.
The justices also disagreed somewhat on whether Andersen’s speedy trial rights were violated. Wright and O’Brien said the defense waived any such claims by agreeing to the hearing dates that pushed the case into 2018. McDade wrote that she disagrees with their legal analysis but not their conclusion.