FORMER ILLINOIS DEATH ROW INMATE CHARLES SILAGY PASSED AWAY (JULY 12, 2019)

            On July 12, 2019, a former death row Inmate from Danville, Charles Silagy, whose death sentence was commuted in 2003 by then-Gov. George Ryan has died from medical issues while in prison. I am satisfied that since he escaped the electric chair and got LWOP, I am glad that he cannot escape illness and he died, happy that he will never get to keep his life.

           

Charles Silagy

Danville man who spent 23 years on death row for 1980 murders dies in prison

• Tracy Crane
• Jul 23, 2019

DANVILLE — A Danville man whose death sentence was commuted in 2003 by then-Gov. George Ryan has died from medical issues while in prison.

Charles Silagy, 69, died this month while in custody, said Lindsey Hess of the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Silagy had been in prison since 1980 — spending about 23 of those years on death row — for the murder of his girlfriend and her sister.

Five days after the two women’s bodies were discovered on Valentine’s Day morning, Silagy confessed.

He told investigators that he began choking girlfriend Cheryl Block, 32, in the truck as they drove home from a strip club where they’d gotten into an argument. After stopping the truck and continuing to beat, kick, then stab her with a pocketknife, he left her body and returned to the trailer the two shared with Ms. Block's sister, Anne "Marty" Waters, 29, and stabbed her to death as well.

A Vermilion County jury convicted Silagy of the crimes five months later.

Nearly 40 years since his conviction, Silagy was an inmate at the Pontiac Correctional Center when he was pronounced dead at OSF Saint James Medical Center in town, according to Livingston County Coroner Danny Watson.

Watson said the cause of death was “medical.”

Silagy had been one of the state’s longest residents of death row in January 2003, when Ryan commuted the sentences of 157 inmates scheduled to die. Eight years later, former Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois.

Silagy was originally sentenced to die three years after Illinois reinstated its death penalty in 1977. His execution by electric chair was scheduled for Nov. 7, 1980.

Though he had fired the public defenders representing him after his conviction and asked the jury to sentence him to death, he eventually changed his mind in prison and filed legal documents to have his conviction overturned.

Over the next 20 years, Silagy’s post-conviction case was heard in various court hearings but ultimately ended with him still on death row three years before Ryan’s commutation of his sentence.

Through the years

A timeline of the Charles Silagy case:

• — Feb. 14, 1980: Silagy becomes angry after his girlfriend, Cheryl Block, 32, goes to a male strip show with her sister, Anne 'Marty' Waters, 29. He picks Ms. Block up from the club, choks and beats her, then drags her into a cornfield and stabs her to death. After returning to their trailer, he gets into an argument with Ms. Waters and beats and stabs her to death with a kitchen knife. Silagy flees to Kentucky, where he is arrested a day later and gives a lengthy confession to police five days after the murders.
• — July 1980: Silagy is convicted of murder following a jury trial. He fires his public defenders and asks the jury to sentence him to death, which it does.
• — 1988-89: Silagy files a petition in federal district court in 1988. After a two-day hearing in July 1989, Judge Harold Baker upholds Silagy’s conviction but overturns his sentence, declaring the Illinois statute on the death penalty unconstitutional.
• — 1990: The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reverses that decision and upholds the statute and Silagy’s sentence.
• — April 1991: The Illinois Supreme Court grants a stay of execution to allow Silagy to pursue a second post-conviction petition that claims he was denied due process because the trial court failed to conduct a fitness hearing to determine whether he was able to represent himself. Silagy claims he was mentally incompetent during his sentencing hearing, and his attorneys claim he had brain damage for various reasons, including a childhood of physical and sexual abuse, head injuries and chronic alcoholism. They also say he was taking twice the normal dosage of Darvocet, a painkiller, which altered his mind.
• — 1999: At a hearing on whether Silagy should have had a fitness hearing in 1980, Fifth Judicial Circuit Judge Richard Scott finds he was entitled to one, and that a retrospective fitness hearing could be conducted.
• — 2000: At the conclusion of that hearing, Scott finds that Silagy was mentally competent at his sentencing hearing.
• — Jan. 12, 2003: Former Gov. George Ryan commutes the sentences of Silagy and other inmates on Illinois' death row to life in prison.
• — July 12, 2019: Silagy, serving his life sentence at the Pontiac Correctional Center, is pronounced dead at a Pontiac hospital due to medical issues, according to the Livingston County Coroner’s Office.

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