Inmate Walks Away From Death Row After His Acquittal

SAN FRANCISCO — A man who spent eight years on San Quentin’s Death Row for a murder in a Merced County cornfield was released from the prison on Wednesday after his acquittal in a retrial last year.

Although it was a rare instance of an inmate walking away from Death Row, it did not mean freedom for Jerry D. Bigelow, 29. He was escorted from prison in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was held pending probable deportation to his native Canada, where criminal proceedings await him.

Bigelow was serving an 18-month term in a Calgary jail for burglary in 1980 when he escaped with prisoner Michael Ramadanovic, hitchhiked to California and went on a crime spree that led to the murder of John Cherry.

“He did beat the system in that the system was wrong,” said Robert Bryan, Bigelow’s attorney. “Usually, the little guy loses. In this case, the little guy won. He beat the system only in that he established his innocence.”

‘Very Little Reaction’

At San Quentin, spokesman Lt. Cal White said: “There really hasn’t been any kind of reaction (to Bigelow’s release). In fact, there was very little reaction from him.”

Bigelow was quoted in the Calgary Herald as saying other Death Row inmates shook his hand and wished him well. “I guess my situation gives them hope for their cases,” the paper quoted him as saying.

Although the state Supreme Court has reversed 88 death sentences since capital punishment was reinstated in California 12 years ago, Bigelow is the only man once condemned to die who won a reversal from the high court and then was acquitted. He is the second who has served time on Death Row at San Quentin before his release from prison.

In the other cases that have been retried, judges and juries have reissued 23 death sentences. At least 11 other men, after new trials, have gotten off Death Row by receiving sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The only other man to walk from California’s Death Row was Chol Soo Lee, a subject of the movie, “True Believer.” Lee was freed in 1983 after he was acquitted by a lower court of a 1973 murder. The high court never acted on his death penalty case.

Bigelow’s unusual case is made stranger still by his actions in the first years after his 1981 conviction. At the time, he demanded that the California Supreme Court allow him to drop his appeals and let his execution proceed. When that failed, he tried twice to kill himself rather than live “through the hell that is Death Row,” Bryan said.

All that changed in 1984 when the Supreme Court, led by then-Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, overturned his conviction, ruling that the trial judge erred by letting Bigelow represent himself. The court said the 1981 trial was a “farce or a sham,” and Bigelow was “totally incompetent as a defense attorney.”

In the retrial last year, Bryan persuaded jurors that Bigelow was asleep in the back of a car when Ramadanovic fired a single bullet into Cherry’s head as he knelt at the rear of his car. Cherry had been on his way home to Modesto when he picked up the hitchhikers in Sacramento.

Falsely Confessed

Bryan argued to jurors that Bigelow falsely confessed to the killing, much as he did when, as a child, he admitted wrongs he did not commit to avoid beatings from his father.

Bigelow was arrested in Arizona after he attempted a robbery. Ramadanovic, who is serving a sentence in Florida for crimes there, pleaded guilty to his part in Cherry’s death and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in California.

In the retrial, a Monterey County jury acquitted Bigelow on May 9, 1988. However, because of inconsistencies on the jury’s verdict form, Superior Court Judge Harkjoon Paik refused to accept the outcome and finally declared a mistrial.

Bryan appealed and a Court of Appeal ruled earlier this year that Paik should have accepted the not-guilty verdict. The state Supreme Court last month refused to review the ruling, opening the way for Bigelow’s release.

“All the courts that have had this case have spoken and that, as far as we’re concerned, is the end of it. The one silver lining is that he isn’t being released to the street,” said Deputy Atty. Gen. Ronald S. Matthias, who had asked the high court to reinstate the case.