Late last year the Illinois General Assembly passed some post-Sept. 11 legislation that, among other things, created a new state crime of terrorism that would qualify for the death penalty.
This week, Gov. George Ryan said, in effect, this was too much of a good thing. He intends to strip the death penalty provision out of the bill through an amendatory veto.
The governor risks the accusation of being not just soft on crime, but soft on terrorism. And, no surprise, some law-and-order legislators are crying just that. After all, they say, if responsibility for some 3,000 deaths doesn’t qualify you for the death penalty, what does?
The simple answer is: Such a crime does, in fact, already qualify you for the death penalty in Illinois.
Ryan is absolutely right in his decision and his motivation behind it. This is not legislation that will deter terrorism. It is a bit of useless legal overkill that will protect no one.
Illinois law already has 20 provisions that qualify a murderer for capital punishment. One example: the murder of a firefighter who is responding to an emergency call. These are called aggravating factors; if you commit a murder and your crime includes one of these aggravating factors, prosecutors can seek capital punishment.
If the people who carried out the attacks of Sept. 11 had targeted Illinois instead of New York and Washington, they would already richly qualify for a sentence of death by lethal injection. In fact, they’d qualify under at least nine–count ’em, nine–of those 20 aggravating factors.
They would qualify for killing firefighters and police officers, for killing two or more people, for killing a child in a brutal manner, for killing in a cold and premeditated manner, for killing someone over age 60, for killing while hijacking an airplane. They’d qualify in a few more ways, too.
The prospects that an international terrorist organization is going to be deterred from its mission by an Illinois law are negligible. But if deterrence were a real factor, there are already plenty of laws on the books in this state to punish terrorists with the forfeiture of their lives.
There were other provisions in the anti-terror legislation that may prove helpful if state authorities wind up in a terrorism investigation. It is far, far more likely, though, that prosecution on a terrorism charge will be carried out by federal prosecutors and federal courts.
So what happened in Illinois?
Lawmakers got caught up in the automatic assumption that every dramatic event requires a new law, whether or not the law has any relevance to the event.
It may not be as satisfying as striking Springfield’s blow against terrorists, but lawmakers instead should be looking at reducing the number of aggravating factors. Some of them have never been applied in a murder case. Some of them, like the one included in the terrorism bill on Ryan’s desk, amount to needless overkill.
