In Illinois, the Rockford Register Star carries the editorial, "Our View: Accept no substitute, abolish death penalty in Illinois," today.
Illinois legislators will be busy during the veto session. It is hard to believe there could be anything more important than the state’s $13 billion deficit and the worst-funded pension liability in the nation.
But neither one of those issues should weigh as heavily on legislators as the knowledge Illinois has wrongly sentenced men to death.
The Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is right: We must go further than extending the moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. We must abolish capital punishment in our state, now and forever.
Former Gov. George Ryan made Illinois the first death penalty state to suspend executions. He did so because he saw the moral and legal indictment in these numbers: Between 1977 and 2000, the state executed 12 people. During the same period, 13 inmates were released because of wrongful convictions.
Reforms have been enacted since the moratorium started. Advocates for the death penalty say the additional protections make remote the chances an innocent person will be convicted.
Oh yeah? Then why does the Illinois State Bar Association — which should have the highest confidence in lawyers — want to abolish the death penalty, too?
And:
According to a report released last week by the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, state taxpayers have spent $100 million since 2003 to defend and prosecute death penalty cases.
Ensuring life sentences is a better use of our money. Execution in Illinois will never meet the standards of fairness and morality, much less accuracy. Tell your state legislator.
The Illinois General Assembly will be meeting in a veto session that lasts 6 days -- November 16 - 18, and November 30 - December 2.
James Clark posts, "LA County: America's Capital Punishment Capital," at California Progress Report. He's the Death Penalty Field Organizer for the ACLU of Southern California.
In striking down America’s death penalty in 1972, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously compared capital punishment to being struck by lightning, arguing that death sentences were given to “a capriciously selected random handful.” For Californians, though, a better metaphor might be an earthquake.
The danger of earthquake, after all, is based on one's proximity to the fault line; death sentences likewise are determined by something as capricious and random as location. And the San Andreas, it turns out, is a fault line for more than just earthquakes: it’s also home to America’s surprising new death penalty capital, Los Angeles County.
LA County condemned 13 people to death in 2009. That’s not only more than any other county in the nation, it’s more than any state in the nation – even capital punishment heavyweights like Texas, Florida and Virginia. The problem isn’t limited to LA County either, as SoCal neighbors Orange and Riverside counties also have aggressive death penalty records, leading the ACLU to dub the three California’s “killer counties.” Bible Belt eat your heart out, the Sun Belt’s a scorcher.
Second Class Justice recently published a set of maps, posted below, that dramatically illustrate the geographic disparity in the death penalty and demonstrate that sentencing records like LA County’s are far outside the mainstream. In fact, just a small handful of counties use the death penalty at all – only 10 percent of American counties have issued a single death sentence in the last six years, and they’re almost exclusively from the South and Southern California.
California mirrors the rest of the nation, with the majority of California counties avoiding the death penalty altogether but a few rogue counties skewing the statewide statistics. According to the ACLU of Northern California’s report, Death in Decline ’09, death sentences have been steadily declining around the state and nation, except in a few counties like Orange, Riverside and most of all Los Angeles, where increasingly aggressive prosecutors are bucking the state and national trend.
At Open Salon, Margaret Summers posts, "Dr. Mario Obledo: A Leader in Death Penalty Abolition."
This Veterans Day week, I’ve been remembering my first impressions of civil rights leader, death penalty abolitionist, and Korean War veteran, Dr. Mario Guerra Obledo. He was courtly. Reserved. Quiet. Polite. Respectful. I don’t remember his exact height, but to me he stood far above everyone around him.
One of 12 children born to Mexican immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Obledo enlisted in the Navy in 1951, serving on a ship in radar technology. After the war, Dr. Obledo went back to his home state. He earned his undergraduate degree in pharmacy from the University of Texas in Austin, and later, his law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.
Like many veterans of color, Dr. Obledo returned from fighting a war for democracy and freedom in another country to find that such rights and freedoms were not always upheld for people of color in the United States. Pete Tijerina, another Latino war veteran, returned from combat with an idea to start a civil rights organization in support of Latinos. He met Dr. Obledo at a social function. With help from a $2.2 million dollar Ford Foundation grant and assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the two veterans founded MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. MALDEF launched Dr. Obledo’s civil rights activism.
And:
In 2006, Dr. Obledo served on the advisory board of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project, which examined whether the death penalty was administered fairly and with due process. To the extent flaws were identified in states’ death penalty systems, states could use the Project’s findings in reforming their systems, impose moratoriums, and/or launch more comprehensive self-examinations of death penalty-related laws and processes. The Project examined death penalty systems in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.
While on the advisory board, Dr. Obledo illustrated how racial and economic disparities in the application of death sentences stem from years of racial and economic discrimination. “I think they should do away with the death penalty,” he said. “Most people convicted are minorities. People of color, or minorities. Only the poor people get executed. The people with money never get executed. That’s why the system should be changed. You would make sure no injustice would occur.”
And:
Dr. Obledo’s contributions to death penalty abolition and civil rights were many. Dr. Obledo died suddenly this August after a heart attack at age 78. While others undoubtedly remember and laud Dr. Obledo for his civil rights activism in LULAC, MALDEF and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, I will always remember, and appreciate, his having devoted a portion of his busy life trying to end the barbaric, racially and economically biased and ineffective crime-fighting tool that is capital punishment.
Earlier posts from James Clark and by Margaret Summers at the links; related posts in the editorial and blog blawg indexes
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