Andrew Urdiales was sentenced to death three times, in two states, by three different courts. Illinois took back two of those sentences, the first by a governor’s order in January 2003 and the second when the state abolished capital punishment in March 2011. The third was imposed in Orange County, California, in October 2018, and within a month he was dead in a cell on San Quentin’s death row. For eight years the sentence that actually governed his life was one no jury had chosen: life without parole, produced by commutation. The same sentence, reached by different routes, appears in nine other cases, and the routes differ. In Illinois it came out of a governor’s pen and a legislature’s repeal. In Washington it was the price of a plea, and in Maryland, a plea that many of the families preferred to years of appeals. In Michigan it was what the statute gave for first-degree murder, in California the outcome of six prosecutors' calculation about time and age, in New York the substitute for a penalty the state did not have, and in Arizona the thing a jury was told about wrongly.
The Urdiales file shows Illinois’s two methods in sequence. Cook County prosecutors tried him first, for the murders of Laura Uylaki and Lynn Huber in 1996. He claimed insanity and mental illness, the jury rejected both, and he was sentenced to death on September 3, 2002, according to the Illinois Supreme Court. Governor George Ryan commuted that sentence on January 10, 2003, in the date the court gives, and it became natural life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Livingston County was a separate case, for the murder of Cassandra Corum, 21. A grand jury had indicted him on March 10, 1998, and in March 2001 the state gave notice that it would seek death. The case came to trial in 2004, after the Cook County sentence had been commuted. On April 23, 2004, he offered to plead guilty but mentally ill. Five experts testified and did not agree with one another. On May 10, 2004, the judge rejected the plea and the insanity defense and convicted him of first-degree murder, noting that the crime showed planning and that no defense expert explained how he had functioned as a Marine and a security guard. The court ruled him eligible for death because of his Cook County convictions, a sentencing jury heard the evidence, and he was sentenced to death. The Illinois Supreme Court, in an opinion of February 16, 2007, modified on May 29, 2007, left the sentence in force. In December 2009 the Associated Press reported that he was on Illinois’s death row.
In March 2011 Governor Pat Quinn signed the bill abolishing the death penalty and commuted the sentences of the 15 men then on death row, Urdiales among them, to life without parole. Within hours, CBS Chicago reported, Orange County prosecutors began seeking his extradition. Jim McKay, the Cook County prosecutor, called the situation a joke and said Urdiales had killed eight women "without remorse." Urdiales left the Pontiac Correctional Facility in late September or early October 2011, and that October the Orange County District Attorney’s Office announced it would seek death. The case involved five women who died in Southern California between 1986 and 1995: Robbin Brandley, Julie McGhee, Mary Ann Wells, Tammie Erwin and Denise Maney. A jury convicted him on May 23, 2018, with multiple-murder and lying-in-wait special circumstances, recommended death that June, and Judge Gregg Prickett imposed it on October 5, 2018. Urdiales was unresponsive in his cell on November 2 and was pronounced dead early on November 3; prison officials investigated the death as a suicide, the Associated Press reported.
The contrast is between two states' reasons. Illinois commuted because its governor chose to in 2003 and because its legislature repealed the penalty in 2011. California tried him for different murders and read Illinois’s commutation as no bar to a death sentence of its own. Life without parole did not carry across the state line as an outcome. It was a sentence for the crimes charged in Illinois.
Brian Dugan’s case shows what the state declined to offer and what that refusal cost. In November 1985 he pleaded guilty in Kane County to two murders, those of Donna Schnorr, 27, and Melissa Ackerman, 7, and received two life sentences. In the plea talks he told prosecutors that he had also killed Jeanine Nicarico, 10, near Naperville in February 1983, and that he had acted alone. He would confess formally, he said, only if he were promised he would not be executed. No promise was made.
By then two men from Aurora had been tried for the Nicarico murder. Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were sentenced to death in February 1985. Their cases ran on for another ten years. Cruz was convicted a second time on February 1, 1990, and again sentenced to death; the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed by 4 to 3 in December 1992, granted a rehearing the following May, and reversed in July 1994, holding that the trial judge had abused his discretion in excluding evidence of five of Dugan’s other crimes. Hernandez was convicted at a third trial on May 17, 1991, and sentenced to 80 years. Cruz was acquitted in November 1995 and the charges against Hernandez were dropped weeks later. DNA testing in 1992 had already excluded Hernandez and a third man charged in the case.
A DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for the Nicarico murder on November 29, 2005, citing DNA evidence. State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett said there would be "no deals." On July 28, 2009, Dugan pleaded guilty without one. "No one aided, abetted or helped me," he told the court. A jury sentenced him to death on November 11, 2009, and the Daily Herald reported the next day that he had come within minutes of having his life spared. Judge George Bakalis imposed the sentence on December 16, 2009. Quinn’s commutation on March 9, 2011, made it life. Dugan was reported serving that sentence in August 2020.
The outcome of the 1985 offer and of the 2011 commutation is the same: a man who would not be executed and would not be released. The state paid for his defense in 2009, at an estimated cost of $750,000 to $1 million, from a fund for poor defendants in capital cases that the Nicarico case had helped to bring about, the Daily Herald reported. One victim’s brother told the 2009 jury that his family had learned of the second link and watched the 1985 plea in Kane County without being asked.
Edward Tenney was convicted of three murders in the Aurora area, and the state ended up with a different sentence for each. For the killing of Mary Jill Oberweis, 56, he was convicted by a Kane County jury on October 17, 1997. The state first sought death, then withdrew the request in May 1999, conceding it had not proved the eligibility factor beyond a reasonable doubt. On June 17, 1999, Judge Donald Hudson sentenced him to natural life, finding the crime exceptionally brutal and wantonly cruel. The Second District Appellate Court affirmed the conviction on April 29, 2002, but vacated the life term by a vote of 2 to 1, holding under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Apprendi decision that facts needed for a life term had to be decided by a jury. The Illinois Supreme Court sent the case back in 2003, the appellate court reinstated the sentence in 2004, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review on October 4, 2004.
The Johannessen case was different. Virginia Johannessen, a widow in her seventies, had died in January 1993, and a man identified by the initials L.L. was convicted and sentenced to 60 years before Tenney’s cousin, Donald Lippert, confessed in May 1995 to taking part in all three killings. The conviction of L.L. was thrown out at the prosecutors' own request. Tenney was convicted of the Johannessen murder in 1998 and sentenced to death. On April 18, 2002, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed because the jury had not been allowed to hear L.L.'s own statement about the crime. In 2005 State’s Attorney John Barsanti took death off the table for the retrial, citing new standards for capital cases and his wish to reach trial sooner. A second jury convicted Tenney on September 27, 2007, after less than six hours. That verdict carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole, and on January 3, 2008, Chief Judge Hudson imposed it, calling the killing a "glimpse into the very depths of human cruelty."
The third case, the murder of Jerry D. Weber, 24, was tried in DuPage County. A jury convicted Tenney in March 2010 and, after about two hours, returned a death sentence; prosecutors called it his third murder conviction. Tenney was one of 15 men on Illinois death row on March 9, 2011, when Quinn signed the abolition bill and commuted all 15 sentences to life without parole. So the same man received natural life, life without parole by statute after a prosecutor dropped death, and life without parole by commutation. Each came through a different door.
Andre Crawford was arrested in January 2000 after DNA from a series of killings of women on Chicago’s South Side, which police had tracked as "Pattern A," was matched to him. He confessed on video. His confession to killing 18-year-old Rhonda King led prosecutors to move on February 10, 2000, to vacate another man’s conviction and death sentence for that murder, and the National Registry of Exonerations records that prosecutors vacated that man’s five other murder convictions too, after which he pleaded guilty to those five and was sentenced to life without parole. Crawford waited almost ten years in the Cook County Jail. In December 2009 a jury convicted him of the murders of 11 women and the attempted murder of a 12th, who survived.
State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said the crimes were "worthy of a death sentence." The jury ruled Crawford eligible for death and did not impose it. One juror said afterward that ten had voted for death and two had held out. The court sentenced him to natural life for the murders and 30 years for the other counts. Some relatives of the women ran from the courtroom; "Justice was not served today," a victim’s brother said. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed on December 16, 2013, and the Illinois Supreme Court denied leave to appeal on March 26, 2014. In the opinion, Justice DeLort noted the earlier conviction of another man for King’s murder: "We find this series of events extraordinarily troubling."
Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty in King County Superior Court on November 5, 2003, to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder. In return for sparing his life, the county’s prosecutor required him to account for every killing he had committed in the county and to help detectives with unsolved cases. On December 18, 2003, Judge Richard Jones sentenced him to 48 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of release and fines of $480,000. The prosecutor, Norm Maleng, told the Associated Press he felt at peace with the decision.
The structure of the agreement reached forward in time. In February 2011 King County charged Ridgway with a 49th murder, that of Rebecca Marrero, 20, and said it would not carry the death penalty; on February 18, 2011, he pleaded guilty and Judge Mary Roberts imposed a 49th consecutive life term. Further women have been named as his victims in the years since, among them Tammie Liles, identified in January 2024 as the last unidentified victim on his list. Ridgway has claimed a far higher total than the 49 counts, 75 to 80 in interviews in 2013, and authorities have treated the claims with skepticism. He was returned to the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla in September 2015, and in December 2025 local reports discussed his declining health.
Washington’s plea gave the sentence a different meaning. For Dugan or Tenney, life without parole was where a contested process ended. For Ridgway it was the whole of the bargain, extended to a 49th murder seven years after the first 48.
Joseph DeAngelo was arrested on April 24, 2018, in Citrus Heights. On April 10, 2019, the prosecution filed notice that it would seek the death penalty. On June 29, 2020, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted dozens of other crimes too old to prosecute. Prosecutors counted 87 victims in 11 counties. The six district attorneys who had consolidated the case in Sacramento County explained the plea in terms of practicalities. The discovery ran to more than 1.3 million pages and a trial could take up to ten years. California had a moratorium on executions, the pandemic had disrupted the courts, and the defendant, the survivors and many witnesses were old. After consulting victims and families they accepted life in prison without parole in return for guilty pleas to all 26 counts and admissions of the uncharged crimes. On August 21, 2020, Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, a further consecutive life term and eight years. In January 2021 he was moved to the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran.
California appears on both sides of the comparison. In 2020 six district attorneys gave up a death notice filed the year before, in return for pleas. In 2018 an Orange County jury had sentenced Urdiales to death.
Raymont Hopewell, 35, pleaded guilty in Baltimore to murdering five older residents of the city, four women and one man, between February 1999 and August 2005, and to four rapes, assault, robbery and burglary. State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy, who rarely sought the death penalty, offered the plea after talking with the victims' families. Many of the relatives, though not all, told prosecutors they would rather have a quick sentence of life without parole than years of appeals in a death penalty case. The state made the offer in August and Hopewell pleaded guilty the next day. "Had he not done that, the state was prepared to seek the death penalty," her spokeswoman, Margaret Burns, said. The son of one victim said he would rather see Hopewell "just rot in jail" and did not object to a deal that spared him execution, because a death sentence would mean a long delay before justice was done. Others wanted him put to death.
Judge John Glynn sentenced him in September 2006 to four consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, with five further life terms and long sentences on the other counts. CBS News reported in 2008 that Maryland police had never collected a DNA sample from him after a 2004 drug conviction, and that three more of the killings followed. The Baltimore plea was built on what the families said.
Matthew Macon, a Lansing parolee, was convicted in May 2008 of the first-degree murders of Sandra Eichorn, 64, and Karen Delgado-Yates, 41, along with other counts including the attempted murder of a third woman, who survived. The jury deliberated about two hours. On June 18, 2008, Chief Judge William Collette sentenced him to life; the first-degree murder counts carried life without parole.
The more revealing decision came two years later. After his arrest Macon told detectives about more deaths, including that of Carolyn Kronenberg, a Lansing Community College professor killed in January 2005, for which another man was serving a life sentence; that man was freed in October 2007. On March 1, 2010, Ingham County Prosecutor Dunnings announced that he was closing five unsolved killings (Ruth Hallman, Barbara Jean Tuttle, Deborah Cooke, Debra Renfors and Kronenberg) without charges. "We have solid reason to believe that the prisoner Macon is responsible for these crimes," he said. Michigan law allowed no greater sentence than the one Macon was already serving, he said, and any trial would end with Macon returning to his cell for the rest of his life. He added that he feared Macon would turn the proceedings into a spectacle. Ruth Hallman’s daughter said the decision left her family feeling like "victims all over again." Delgado-Yates’s brother said it pained him that the other families would never have a verdict.
Michigan shows life without parole as a ceiling. No heavier sentence was available, so the state stopped. The cost was a missing verdict.
New York’s case is the oldest and the oddest fit. When police arrested Arthur Shawcross in the Rochester area in January 1990, UPI reported, New York had no death penalty, and second-degree murder carried 25 years to life on each count. He was 44. In 1972 in Watertown he had pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree in the death of an eight-year-old girl, Karen Ann Hill, reduced from murder. His lawyer, Paul Dierdorf, told the Watertown Daily Times that the manslaughter law then included a provision for killings committed under extreme emotional circumstances and that juries in a couple of earlier trials had returned verdicts of that kind. He was sentenced on October 17, 1972, to a maximum of 25 years. He admitted the death of a ten-year-old boy as well, and was never convicted of it. Parole freed him from Green Haven on April 30, 1987, after about 15 years.
The Rochester charges, filed January 1990, covered eight women at first, then ten. On December 13, 1990, a Monroe County jury rejected his insanity defense after about six and a half hours and convicted him of ten counts of second-degree murder; in March 1991 he pleaded guilty in Wayne County to an eleventh. Each count carried a possible 25 years to life. The minimum term the judge set has not been reported, and the sentence has not been described as life without parole. He was held at Sullivan Correctional Facility, serving life, and died on November 10, 2008, after being taken to Albany Medical Center; the Commission of Correction later ruled his medical care grossly negligent.
The 1972 plea and the 1987 parole are the context: of a maximum of 25 years for the first killing, he served about 15.
Cory Deonn Morris, 24 at his arrest in April 2003, was convicted by a Maricopa County jury in July 2005 of five counts of first-degree murder, of Barbara Codman, Shanteria Davis, Jade Velasquez, Sharon Noah and Julie Castillo, and the same jury sentenced him to death on each count. In the aggravation phase the jury identified two aggravating circumstances: his convictions for other serious offenses, which were the five murders themselves, and that each was committed in an especially cruel and depraved manner. In the penalty phase it heard mitigation evidence about his upbringing, his hygiene and appearance, his wish to better himself and his work record, and judged it not substantial enough to call for leniency. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed in 2007 in State v. Morris, 215 Ariz. 324.
What matters in his case is what the jurors were told about the alternative. A federal court noted in 2023 that in the aggravation phase they were told the court would impose either life without the possibility of parole or a life sentence with no release until at least 25 years had been served. In the penalty phase they were told that a life sentence meant release only after 25 calendar years, or natural life. The federal court ruled that these instructions misstated the law: Morris was not eligible for parole. His lawyers built their longest-running federal claim on that error, contrary, they argued, to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Simmons v. South Carolina (1994) and Lynch v. Arizona (2016).
It did not succeed. On September 15, 2022, the district court paused the case until the Supreme Court decided Cruz v. Arizona, which it did on February 22, 2023. On June 28, 2023, the court denied Morris’s request to return to state court. It held that the parole part of the claim was plainly meritless under the Arizona Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in State v. Bush, because Morris had not asked for a parole-ineligibility instruction and had not been prevented from telling the jury about it, and that the related claims against his trial and appellate lawyers were procedurally defaulted. On June 20, 2024, the court denied reconsideration after the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Anderson of May 2, 2024, concluding that the change in Arizona’s rules did not help him because his post-conviction lawyers should have seen the parole issue by 2015, and no later than 2016. A federal court described him that day as an Arizona death row prisoner. The jury that sentenced him to death was told, wrongly, that the other choice was a sentence that could end in release.
Three of the ten, Dugan, Urdiales and Tenney, had death sentences taken away from them by Illinois, in 2003 and 2011, and the same law that ended the penalty made life without parole the sentence for all of them. Crawford is the Illinois case in which a jury made the decision on its own, and it made it by stalling at ten to two. In Washington and Maryland life without parole was the price prosecutors accepted in a plea, in Maryland after consulting the families. In California six district attorneys weighed a trial that might take ten years against a plea. Michigan’s prosecutor stopped charging because no heavier sentence was available. New York had no death penalty and no obvious alternative; Arizona had the penalty and, in the account of a federal court, told its jurors wrongly what the alternative was.
Ten cases are not a survey of fifty states, and none of them should be read as typical. What the cases do show is that the sentence has no single meaning: it changed with the state, the prosecutor and the year.
• October 17, 1972: Arthur Shawcross sentenced in Watertown, New York, to a maximum of 25 years after a plea to manslaughter.
• February 1985: Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez sentenced to death for the Nicarico murder.
• November 1985: Brian Dugan pleads guilty to two Illinois murders and receives two life sentences.
• April 30, 1987: Shawcross paroled from Green Haven.
• January 1990: Shawcross arrested in the Rochester area.
• December 13, 1990: Monroe County jury convicts Shawcross of ten murders.
• May 1995: Donald Lippert confesses; the first conviction for the Johannessen killing is later thrown out.
• November 1995: Cruz acquitted.
• October 17, 1997: Edward Tenney convicted of the Oberweis murder.
• June 17, 1999: Tenney sentenced to natural life.
• January 2000: Andre Crawford arrested.
• April 18, 2002: Illinois Supreme Court reverses Tenney’s Johannessen conviction.
• September 3, 2002: Andrew Urdiales sentenced to death in Cook County.
• January 10, 2003: Governor George Ryan commutes Urdiales’s sentence to natural life.
• November 5, 2003: Gary Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts; sentenced December 18.
• May 10, 2004: Urdiales convicted in Livingston County; later sentenced to death.
• July 2005: Cory Morris sentenced to death in Maricopa County.
• September 2006: Raymont Hopewell sentenced in Baltimore to four consecutive terms of life without parole.
• January 3, 2008: Tenney sentenced to life without parole for the Johannessen murder.
• June 18, 2008: Matthew Macon sentenced to life.
• July 28, 2009: Dugan pleads guilty to the Nicarico murder; sentenced to death December 16.
• December 2009: Crawford sentenced to natural life after a jury declines death.
• March 1, 2010: Ingham County prosecutor closes five killings without charges.
• February 18, 2011: Ridgway pleads guilty to a 49th murder.
• March 9, 2011: Illinois abolishes the death penalty; 15 death sentences, including Dugan’s, Tenney’s and Urdiales’s, become life without parole.
• October 5, 2018: Urdiales sentenced to death in Orange County; dies in custody November 2018.
• June 29, 2020: Joseph DeAngelo pleads guilty; sentenced August 21, 2020.
• June 20, 2024: federal court denies reconsideration in Morris’s case.