Lessons to learn from Kevin Fox case

Last week in these pages, we told you why we have a policy about not naming suspects before they are charged with a crime.

Those suspects may never be charged -- as was the case with Richard Jewell, who was suspected -- wrongly -- across the nation and certainly throughout the media of setting off the bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.

We didn't jump on that bandwagon because of what we learned during the first few weeks of the Brown's Chicken murders investigation in 1993 when an Elgin man was named by us and everyone else as a suspect but turned out not to be involved and was never charged.

It's those same kind of lessons that can be learned by law enforcement officials in the case of Kevin Fox -- who was charged in the killing of his 3-year-old daughter, Riley, in 2004. Detectives made up their minds and went forward with charges -- until eight months later when DNA tests paid for by the defense proved Fox wasn't the killer.

Yes, Fox confessed on videotape during the interrogation, but testified that he agreed to the story of an accidental killing out of desperation and amid threats.

And last week, a jury awarded Fox and his wife, Melissa, $15.5 million in their lawsuit against the Will County detectives who arrested him and interrogated him.

It's not like Will County didn't have other cases to learn from. How about the $36 million Cook County settled on to pay the so-called "Ford Heights Four," who spent 18 years in prison before getting cleared in a 1978 double murder.

Or the case of Rolando Cruz, who received $3 million from DuPage County in a settlement after Cruz was freed from Death Row in 1995 after being acquitted during a third trial for the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico, 10, of Naperville.

The Fox case -- and certainly the verdict -- is a warning to all law enforcement officials, said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's School of Law.

"To be liable at all in a civil rights case means that they have had to have done something wrong, not just simple negligence," Warden told the Daily Herald's Christy Gutowski. "In other words, they should have known better. They didn't have probable cause to arrest him and they did it anyway."

And now, three years later, Riley's killing still is unsolved. It's unfortunate that Will County officials plan to appeal the civil case they just lost and the defendants say they still suspect that Kevin Fox had something to do with Riley's murder.

It's time they look at the facts, look at the jury's verdict, and learn to move on and spend more time looking to solve this tragic killing.

Enough time has passed. Riley deserves justice now.