Should a Terminally Ill Prisoner Have to Die Behind Bars?

Montell Johnson is a 42-year-old man who spends every hour of every day in a hospital bed. He can't move, and he can't talk. He eats through a feeding tube inserted into his stomach. Years of inactivity have taken their toll: "He has no body tissue or muscle now," his mother, Gloria, says. "He's very sensitive to touch, and so it's excruciating pain when you touch his body … There's nothing really there to protect him." He weighs 70 lbs.

Johnson suffers from multiple sclerosis, a chronic and debilitating illness that attacks the central nervous system and erodes a person's capacity for basic functions. He is in the final stages of MS and is suffering from a long list of related and other ailments, including hepatitis C, which threatens to take his life. Just over a year ago, a doctor gave Johnson less than six months to live. That he has defied the prognosis is undoubtedly due to the dedicated care of his mother, rather than the quality of his medical care. That's because Johnson is not at a hospital. He is a prisoner at Sheridan Correctional Center, in La Salle County, Ill.

Five days a week, Gloria Johnson-Ester drives from her home on the South Side of Chicago to Sheridan, two hours away ("two-and-a-half to three in traffic"). Since her son was diagnosed with MS in 2001, she has seen his health deteriorate dramatically due to gross medical neglect by the Illinois prison system.

"Inmates aren't considered a priority," she says, "but I always tell people, they are human beings. … Whether they are guilty or innocent, when they get sick, you treat them."

Johnson was convicted of murder in 1999 and sent to death row. In 2003, his sentence was commuted to 40 years, and on Oct. 30, 2008, Gov. Rod Blagojevich commuted his sentence to time served. This means the state of Illinois has no legal basis for keeping him incarcerated. But now he faces a new challenge: the possibility of extradition to California for a different charge. For Gloria, who has been fighting for years to bring her son home for the last months of his life, this would be an unthinkable defeat.

"I know one thing," she says. "If they take me away, then he'll just give up."

"An Easy Conviction"

Johnson was sentenced to die for the 1994 slaying of Dorianne Warnsley. Warnsley, 23, died a harrowing death, first shot and then beaten with a hammer and stabbed with a screwdriver. Her body was found in a cornfield in Macon County, Ill. She was five months pregnant.

Johnson has admitted that he was on the scene the night Warnsley was killed, but he insists that he did not commit the crime. To some extent, his actions belie his claims: Johnson left Illinois for California after it happened, adopted a different name, and then was arrested for another killing and robbery, getting a life sentence. When the state of Illinois sought to bring him back to be tried, he maintained his innocence. He still does.

Johnson has many supporters who believe him. Perhaps none is more significant than Terry Hoyt, Dorianne Warnsley's mother.

"The judicial system in Macon County sucks," she says over the phone on the day after Thanksgiving. "I'm not a teenager, and I'm using that word. It should be totally investigated.

"My daughter was murdered in '94. The guy who actually committed the murder was not arrested until three years later." The man she is referring to, Carlos Stokes, provided multiple confessions, only to turn around and testify against Johnson in exchange for a 15-year sentence. According to Hoyt, not only was the investigation flawed -- "The police were so far in left field it was ridiculous" -- when it came time to press charges, Johnson, who had been friends with Dorianne, was railroaded.

"The prosecutor struck a deal," says Ted Pearson, a prison-reform activist in Chicago, who has spent years working on Johnson's case.

As he describes it, Stokes, Johnson, and a third woman, Sandra Dye, "had gotten into a row with the victim, and one of them, Stokes, actually murdered her. … He didn't deny that he had confessed to that, and the woman also gave statements corroborating his. But (at trial) he said that Montell told him to do it -- so that made Montell not just guilty by being there, but also guilty by directing the whole thing." Dye was never charged.

Stokes' plea bargain -- and his eventual release -- took place without Hoyt's knowledge, a violation of her rights as a crime victim that still angers her to this day. She describes how she showed up at court on the day of his scheduled trial, only to be told by the judge, "we took care of that yesterday afternoon."