He is a namesake of one of history’s greatest prophets.
When Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses Harrison II wrote a dissenting opinion in November condemning the death penalty and declaring that “the execution of an innocent person is inevitable,” Harrison came unnervingly close to being prophetic himself.
Just three months later, Anthony Porter, a Chicago man who once came within two days of being executed, was released from Death Row when another man admitted that he had committed two 1982 slayings pinned on Porter.
“Too close for comfort” is what Harrison calls Porter’s rescue from Death Row.
Although the evidence exonerating Porter was uncovered in an investigation by journalism students, some people said Porter’s exoneration showed how well the justice system works.
“That’s sheer baloney,” Harrison said in a recent interview in his office here. “The system didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Harrison’s staunch opposition to the death penalty–one of the state’s most volatile issues–has placed him in the public eye, a rare position for most jurists despite their considerable power and influence.
Last week, Harrison ordered a stay of Death Row inmate Andrew Kokoraleis’ execution until the U.S. Supreme Court could rule on a final motion. But the state Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, tossed out Harrison’s stay, and Kokoraleis was executed on Wednesday.
Elected to the state Supreme Court in 1992, Harrison is a man who speaks his mind, both in and out of court, and the language he uses has, at times, been so strong that it rankles some of his colleagues. But Harrison also can be called a gentleman rebel, a distinctly gracious man whose convictions are firm and manners mild.
Under the Supreme Court’s traditional rotation system, he is in line to be the next chief justice once Charles Freeman’s term ends.
A southern Illinois native, Harrison lives in Fairview Heights, near St. Louis, in a little house on the prairie surrounded by ash, oak and fields of corn and beans. Unlike many judges, he never worked as a full-time government lawyer. He was never a prosecutor, a public defender or a corporation counsel. And Harrison isn’t the son of a judge or a former member of some large and prestigious law firm with a client roster of Fortune 500 companies.
Harrison brings to the bench a working man’s resume that includes stints as a ranch hand, a truck driver, a Teamsters organizer and a lawyer whose clients included many a pimp and prostitute. He also brings to a branch of government known for ceremony and refined language a street fighter’s willingness to mix it up, whether it’s trading digs with former Gov. Jim Edgar or writing passionate dissents that abandon all delicacy and cut to the bone.
In a dissent stemming from a personal-injury lawsuit, Harrison charged his colleagues with giving telephone companies “license to maim our children.” In another dissent, he characterized the court as so hostile to organized labor that “the government wins, the unions lose and that is that.”
Many of the state’s lawyers appreciate Harrison’s fiercely independent streak.
“He is his own man. He stands up for those ideals that he has always had,” said Todd Smith, former president of the Illinois State Bar Association, “and what I mean is, he seems to come from a background of a regular guy just working his way through and turning himself into a terrific lawyer and a fine judge. But he seems to have never forgotten about regular folks.”
But the often strident language that Harrison uses in his dissents has irritated some colleagues. In the November death penalty case, Justice Benjamin Miller wrote a separate opinion accusing Harrison of impugning the integrity of his fellow justices.
“We cannot prescribe civility to members of the bar when our own opinions are disfigured by comments as offensive as those we have admonished lawyers for making,” Miller wrote in an opinion joined by two other justices.
Harrison is a minority of one on the court in his belief that Illinois’ use of the death penalty should be struck down as unconstitutional.
“I think that a person ought to have the intellectual courage to stand up for what they think is right,” Harrison said recently. “In this world, I do find a lot of physical courage, but I don’t find much intellectual courage. I don’t find many people who stand up and take unpopular positions. And I’ve taken plenty of them.”
One of Harrison’s more controversial stances was when he refused to recuse himself as head of the Illinois Courts Commission when it was deciding whether to discipline James Heiple, a fellow Illinois Supreme Court justice who was accused of using his position to dodge traffic tickets. Heiple wound up being censured.
In his more than six years on the state’s highest court, Harrison has consistently done things that judges don’t typically do.
In a time when liberalism is cursed and law and order venerated, Harrison unabashedly declares himself, on matters of policy, a liberal.
Although most justices express their views only in court rulings and annual reports, Harrison has gone so far as to issue a statement offering unsolicited advice to the governor. In January, he suggested that Gov. George Ryan should use his power of reprieve to suspend executions pending further study of the death penalty.
Speaking at a dinner hosted by the state’s two largest bar groups, Harrison did away with the usual platitudes and instead took a controversial stand that many members of the bar didn’t want to hear. In a room that included many lawyers who make their living through alternative dispute resolution–an approach that stresses negotiation instead of litigation–Harrison criticized the practice as one likely to result in “a cut-rate brand of rough justice that is neither fair nor consistent but merely cheap.”
Harrison, 66, grew up in Collinsville, a southern Illinois town near St. Louis. Located on the Mississippi bluffs, Collinsville has about 20,000 people.
In years past, its economic lifeblood consisted largely of coal mines. Many of Harrison’s ancestors were miners, and his paternal grandfather became a doctor who turned the bottom floor of his home into a makeshift hospital where he tended to miners.
“A lot of those people couldn’t afford to go to a hospital, but Dr. Harrison would take care of them,” says Phil Rarick, an Illinois Appellate Court justice and longtime friend of Harrison’s.
Harrison’s father was a dentist and his mother a nurse. After Harrison became a lawyer, he worked in an office next door to his dad’s office.
Before becoming a lawyer, Harrison spent several years in Colorado. At various times he worked on a ranch, drove a truck and helped organize for the Teamsters. He studied political science at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, then returned to the Midwest and graduated from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.
Harrison remained in private practice for about 15 years.
“My shingle was out for everybody,” he said. “I didn’t do that much of any one thing, but I did a lot of everything.”
He represented plaintiffs in personal-injury suits. He also represented defendants in civil suits. He practiced corporate, domestic relations and criminal law. “I sued a few banks, and I represented a few banks too,” he said.
Harrison became a Circuit Court judge in 1973, an Illinois Appellate Court justice in 1979 and an Illinois Supreme Court justice in 1992. On the state’s highest court, he has become known among his colleagues for being outgoing and energetic.
While in session, the court’s seven justices live together on the third floor of the Supreme Court building in Springfield.
“It’s unbelievable. You open the door and there he is, walking up and down the hall, reading. He’s always wanting to talk about cases. His energy is just boundless,” Freeman said of Harrison. “He’ll ask, `What do you think about this issue?’ “
To which Freeman often responds: “`Oh, please, Moses, I’m going to sleep.”
