“Sentencing Unit Internet Homework” Name: _heidi eurich_____________________

Instructions: Use the Internet to answer the questions below. YOU MUST INCLUDE AT LEAST 2 PICTURES! If you are writing this out by hand, you do not need to include pictures. Do not just cut & paste from the Internet. (Because so few of you actually write like an encyclopedia, it is easy for me to tell when you’re copying).

1. Who was Judge Roy Bean?

Phantly Roy Bean, Jr. was an eccentric U.S. saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Val Verde County, Texas. According to legend, Judge Roy Bean held court in his saloon along the Rio Grande in a desolate stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert of southwest Texas. After his death, Western films and books cast him as a hanging judge, though he is known to have sentenced only two men to hang, one of whom escaped.

2. Who was Rolando Cruz? What happened to him? (Include a lot of details!)

In February 1985, a Hispanic man from Aurora, Illinois named Rolando Cruz and a co-defendant were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, deviant sexual assault and murder of 10-year old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County Circuit Court despite the fact that the police had no physical evidence linking them to the crime. Cruz was pardoned after more than 10 years in custody.

3. Who is Anthony Porter, for what was he convicted, and how did he eventually get set free?

Anthony Porter was a prisoner on death row whose conviction was overturned in 1999 due to the investigation of two Northwestern University School of Law professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism, and is notable for being an exonerated death row inmate that was once 50 hours away from execution. He was convicted with the two murders in August 1982, two teenagers, Marilyn Green and her fiance Jerry Hillard, were shot and killed near a swimming pool in Washington Park on the south side of Chicago.

4. What is Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law all about?

A stand-your-ground law states that a person may use force in self-defense when there is reasonable belief of a threat, without an obligation to retreat first. In some cases, a person may use deadly force in public areas without a duty to retreat