
Randall “Madman” Miller used to thunder across the Midwest on a Harley-Davidson as a member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, always ready with a knife, a gun, even a bomb.
Often, that was while defending the honor of his biker gang against the Hells Angels, the blood enemy of the Outlaws.
These days, Miller gets around in a wheelchair, not a motorcycle, while serving two life sentences in federal prison on a racketeering conviction that encompassed a series of violent crimes, including the 1993 killings of Morris and Ruth Gauger, a couple in their 70s who ran a business near the McHenry County town of Richmond.
He’s a changed man, the onetime violent biker gang member and drug trafficker has said in court pleadings, and devoted to God now, with his mobility greatly limited since a leg was amputated.

Citing poor health and his fears of COVID-19 in prison, he asked U.S. District Judge J.P.Stadtmueller for a compassionate release from prison under the federal First Step Act, which, among other things, allows federal convicts to seek reductions in their sentences for drug crimes and lets elderly and sick inmates seek compassionate releases.
He recently got his answer: an emphatic no.
“Our criminal justice system has the capacity for — indeed the goal to promote — remorse and compassion,” Stadtmueller, who is based in Milwaukee and who, at Miller’s sentencing in 2000, indicated he was sorry the law didn’t allow him to impose the death penalty, said in a ruling Feb. 14. “But healing requires time and adequately served punishment.”