As the General Assembly inches toward a momentous decision on whether to end capital punishment in Illinois, state prosecutors are lobbying hard to stall a vote. Lame-duck lawmakers are hustling to pass a bill without getting the facts, the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association says.
Nonsense. Lawmakers have had 10 years to reflect — and act — on the failures of a system that sent at least 20 innocent men to death row. Illinois hasn’t executed an inmate since 1999, the year before then-Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium that continues to this day.
Three years later, Ryan emptied the state’s death row, commuting the sentences of 167 condemned inmates and pardoning four others.
But the system isn’t fixed. Far from it. A flurry of reforms were enacted: The Illinois Supreme Court set minimum standards for attorneys in capital cases and mandated more training for judges. The General Assembly passed a law requiring homicide interrogations to be recorded, to guard against coerced confessions, and created the Capital Litigation Trust Fund to ensure that death penalty trials aren’t compromised for lack of resources.
But lawmakers haven’t taken steps to ensure that the death penalty is applied evenly across geographic or demographic lines, or to prevent wrongful convictions based on errant identifications by witnesses or mistakes at forensic labs. An unintended consequence of the moratorium is that there is less pressure to finish that job. We’re not executing anyone, the reasoning goes, so what’s the harm?
Plenty. Prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty; they may in fact be more likely to do so in marginal cases so they can tap into the trust fund to pay for the trial. Statewide, there have been more than 500 capital cases since the moratorium began. Those cases — typically twice as expensive as noncapital cases — have cost taxpayers more than $100 million and sent 15 prisoners to death row.
There’s still no guarantee we’re getting those cases right. In Lake County, prosecutors disregarded DNA evidence and charged Jerry Hobbs with killing his 8-year-old daughter and a playmate; in Will County, Kevin Fox was accused of killing his 3-year-old daughter after giving a confession he later said was coerced. Both men were threatened with the death penalty but freed when DNA pointed to other suspects.
Such missteps, intentional or otherwise, cement the conclusion that the system can’t be made fail-safe.
“Human beings make errors, especially when there’s immense pressure on them to solve a crime,” said state Sen. Kwame Raoul, a former Cook County prosecutor and a sponsor of the bill to end the death penalty.
At their news conference this week, prosecutors yielded the podium to relatives of murder victims, who argued that justice demands the ultimate penalty for the most heinous crimes. Last month, the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty offered a similar forum for more than a dozen former inmates who spent years on death row for murders they didn’t commit. It’s a heart-wrenching debate. But it’s gone on long enough.
Illinois taxpayers are wasting millions of dollars preserving a judicial remedy we don’t trust and don’t use. Lawmakers have all but stopped trying to fix the system, a tacit but damning acknowledgment that it’s irreparably broken.
What are we waiting for? End the death penalty now.
