Why was Maust free?
Published December 20, 2003
Twice-convicted killer David Maust stands formally charged in Indiana with the murders of James Raganyi, 16, Michael Dennis, 13, and Nick James, 19. While prosecutors prepare to try him, police in Illinois and Indiana take up the grim task of investigating whether there have been more victims since Maust was released from prison in 1999. And the natural, the obvious, question is: Why was Maust free?
As a U.S. Army private stationed in Germany in 1974, Maust admitted killing a 13-year-old boy. He was convicted of manslaughter but served less than four years in federal prison. In the early 1980s, he was convicted in Texas of stabbing a teenager. While serving a five-year sentence in Texas, he was extradited to Illinois and convicted in the 1981 murder of 15-year-old Donald Jones. A Cook County sheriff's police officer wrote on a cover sheet to his extradition papers: "Bad Guy. Gacey Type." A reference to serial killer John Wayne Gacy.
After Maust pleaded guilty to the Jones murder, a fact sheet sent to the Illinois Department of Corrections by the Cook County state's attorney's office urged that he not be let out a day sooner than his 35-year sentence would allow. "This inmate is most likely the most dangerous inmate you will house," it said. If he had served the full sentence, Maust would have been sitting in prison until 2017. (The clock started in 1982 when Maust was incarcerated in Illinois).
Instead, the Illinois Department of Corrections sprang him in 1999. Why? Under a now-abandoned system, prisoners could automatically cut their sentences in half. Every day of "good time" without a prison rule infraction subtracted a day from their sentences. Maust spent only 17 years behind bars.
The law has changed. It requires those convicted of first-degree murder to serve their entire sentence and those convicted of other violent crimes to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence. But it doesn't apply to those who were convicted before the change went into effect. As a Sunday Tribune story noted, only about 10 percent of the 7,300 inmates in Illinois prisons for murder must serve their full sentences.
Could Maust have been kept in prison for his full term? That's something for prison officials and lawmakers to take up. There are those who kill, who serve lengthy sentences, and who can be released with some assurance they won't kill again. And there are those who are just too dangerous to be allowed ever again to walk free.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
