A Chicago podiatrist who fatally shot a patient cooperating with a federal fraud investigation into his Medicare billings was among 37 people whose federal death sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden.
In January 2002, Ronald Mikos, 76, called Joyce Brannon days before she was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury and tried to convince her to reconsider, Tribune archives show. Three days later, federal prosecutors said Brannon, a disabled church warden, was shot in the head and back at close range at a North Side church where she lived and worked.
With about a month left in office, Biden announced Monday that he would commute dozens of death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole. They include a former Lake County man who received a federal death penalty for the murder of a Navy petty officer in Virginia.
Authorities had investigated Mikos for fraud. They alleged in a 25-count indictment that he defrauded Medicare of more than $1.25 million by falsely claiming to have performed thousands of surgeries and that he obstructed justice by recruiting patients to lie to investigators about the fraud . In Brannon’s case, authorities say, Mikos fraudulently billed Medicare for 85 nonexistent surgeries on her feet.
Brannon, 54, worked at Bethany Lutheran Church in the Edgewater neighborhood and used canes or a wheelchair to get around because of severe asthma.
Three days before her death on January 27, 2002, Brannon told a sister and a friend that Mikos had called her that day to try to remove her from testifying. According to the Tribune stories, she said she believed she had to do the right thing.
In 2005, a federal jury imposed the death penalty after lawyers tried unsuccessfully to spare his life, claiming that his judgment was affected by mental illness and abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs, and that he had three young children.
After deliberating for three days during the penalty phase of the trial, some jurors told the Tribune that the decision to impose the death penalty had been a difficult one.
“It wasn’t an open and shut case,” one juror said. “We tried to put our emotions aside as best we could.”
Mikos is being held at the federal prison in Terre Haute.
Jorge Torrez, 36, a former Marine who grew up in Zion, was convicted of murder in the July 2009 killing of Amanda J. Snell at a Washington-area military base. However, Torrez was also linked via DNA to the infamous stabbing deaths of 8-year-old Laura Hobbs and 9-year-old Krystal Tobias in Zion in 2005.
Lake County prosecutors later charged Torrez with the murders and released Laura’s father, Jerry Hobbs, who had spent five years in prison awaiting trial before being acquitted of the crime and released.
After already receiving the death penalty in the Virginia case, Torrez pleaded guilty to the girls’ murder in 2018 and was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
