Arrest of innocent cop could haunt Peterson case

Brian Dorian's name may never be spoken in court, and memories may fade about how the small-town police officer was wrongly charged in a deadly shooting spree along the Illinois-Indiana border.

But his arrest followed by the revelation that he could not have committed the crimes could cast a shadow over future cases and perhaps hamper prosecutors' efforts to get convictions, including in the case of another officer charged with murder: Drew Peterson.

The Dorian case marks the latest debacle in Will County, where residents well remember the slaying of a 3-year-old girl and the father locked up for months before DNA evidence cleared him. The question is whether jurors will wonder — as a newspaper headline did this week — "What's Wrong in Will County?"

"If (jurors) don't have as much confidence in prosecutors, they're going to look at what they say with a jaundiced eye and think 'You are positive this time, you were positive last time. Maybe you are positively wrong,'" said William Healy, a jury consultant in Chicago and a former Cook County prosecutor.

That could be particularly bad news in Will County, where there has been one headline-grabbing case after another in recent years. There is Peterson, who is charged in the 2004 slaying of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. Another man, Christopher Vaughn, is awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges in the 2007 shooting deaths of his wife and three young children.

Authorities are still hunting for the gunman or gunmen who shot and killed five women at a Lane Bryant store in 2008. They have yet to find the bodies or make arrests in the 2007 disappearances of Lisa Stebic and Drew Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy — even though Stebic's husband has been named a "person of interest" in that case and Drew Peterson a suspect in his wife's disappearance.

It's not clear how the Dorian case and other law enforcement misfires will affect those cases, but it certainly gives defense attorneys opportunity in court.

"It reminds people that sometimes people are wrongly accused," said Joe Tacopina, a prominent New York defense attorney. "The point is when people come into the jury room, even though there is a presumption of innocence, they think, 'God, this guy did something wrong to be sitting there.'"

There is another possibility: that State's Attorney James Glasgow's decision to drop charges so quickly might work in his favor.

"There's a botched case here, sure, but it's a case where the state's attorney tried to do the right thing," said Kathleen Zellner, an attorney who won a civil rights lawsuit in 2007 for Kevin Fox, the father who was exonerated in the slaying of his daughter. "Glasgow is one of the few (state's attorneys) who has the integrity to let someone go when a mistake is made."

Glasgow spokesman Charles Pelkie said he hopes jurors remember that Glasgow has proven a number of times, including in the Fox case, that he is willing to drop charges when he realizes the wrong man is behind bars.

"Once they (defense attorneys) stop smearing this state's attorney, once the dust settles, this prosecutor will pursue... justice regardless of the public perception," he said.

But Dorian's arrest will certainly be the "elephant in the room" if someone else is tried in the shootings that left one man dead and two others injured, Healy said.

For starters, a man who escaped when the gunman opened fire and shot two of his co-workers identified Dorian twice as the shooter — once when he picked his driver's license photo out of a series of pictures and a second time when he singled him out of a police lineup.

"That person is pretty damaged as a credible witness," Healy said. "A defense attorney is going to say, 'What about this guy? What about this guy? How many people can you identify?'"

Prosecutors will still likely be forced to call the man, said Dick Devine, the former Cook County State's Attorney.

"There's a loud thud if you don't call that person," he said. "They (jurors) are going to be looking at each other wondering why."

Pelkie expects Drew Peterson's attorneys to try to use the case to their advantage, both to sway potential jurors before trial and perhaps during the trial itself.

"They've never been shy about saying outlandish things in the media," he said, "and we won't be surprised if they try to use this case somehow in an effort to mislead the public."

That effort has already begun.

"Charging this guy (Dorian) is an incredible abuse of discretion," said one of Peterson's attorneys, Joe Lopez. "It's just a series of missteps by the office and I think the juries are going to look a lot different at their cases from now on."

Neither Lopez nor Peterson's lead attorney, Joel Brodsky, would say how they might use the Dorian case at trial, but Tacopina said there are all sorts of subtle ways to remind jurors that the state's attorney's office prosecuting Peterson was once just as sure that another police officer had committed murder.

Healy suggested Dorian may be more of a burden for prosecutors months and even years from now when people forget exactly what they heard about the case.

"It's certainly something that can linger," he said. "In a year... they might think, 'God, don't the investigators have some kind of problem with investigations in Will County?'"