Today's Chicago Sun-Times carries the editorial, "Illinois should end the death penalty."
If a state insists on a death penalty, it does so with this knowledge: At some time and at some place, an innocent person will be executed.
No system is perfect, no system is free of mistakes. And that, above all other reasons, is why a state-sanctioned death penalty is unwise. A government cannot possibly impose capital punishment in a way that ensures it is on the right side of justice in every single instance.
The very idea of strapping someone to a gurney and injecting him with lethal drugs for a crime he did not commit should be sickening in a just society.
Last week, in a brave and stunning vote, the Illinois House of Representatives voted to abolish the death penalty in Illinois, 11 years after former Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions. The bill now moves to the state Senate, where it could be voted on as early as today.
We urge the Senate to pass the bill, and we urge Gov. Quinn to sign it. Seize the moment.
And:
In 1998, the Illinois Supreme Court declined to declare the death penalty unconstitutional. Instead, the court wrote: “This is emphatically a question for the Legislature.”
The Illinois House has courageously answered that question.
It’s time for the Senate and the governor to do so as well.
Springfield's State Journal-Register carries the editorial, "Senate also should nix death penalty." It appeared in the Sunday edition.
The 96th General Assembly began its business two years ago this month in historic fashion, swiftly impeaching and removing Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office.
In its waning hours, the 96th has the opportunity to end its term with an equally historic act. On Thursday, the House — in a tense process that involved two roll call votes — voted to abolish capital punishment in Illinois.
Today we call on the Illinois Senate to do the same when it returns this week for the final two days of this legislative session.
More than a decade after Gov. George Ryan put a halt to executions in Illinois and with two subsequent governors having kept his moratorium in place, Illinois should make official what we believe has long been obvious. A state that, between 1977 and 1999, executed 12 people and wrongly sentenced 13 innocent people to death has no business resuming executions. Exonerations that followed Ryan’s moratorium bring to 20 the number of people wrongly sent to death row.
Even with all the reforms of the last decade, there never will be a guarantee that the state won’t execute an innocent person. In Will and Lake counties in 2004 and 2005, two men were threatened with the death penalty when convicted of murdering their young daughters. One had confessed; it was later learned he did so under coercion. DNA evidence later exonerated both. This in the wake of capital punishment “reform.”
The uneven application of the death penalty is another profoundly disturbing aspect of capital punishment.
And:
The House’s action last week was a courageous step for justice and a realistic embrace of the reality of capital punishment in Illinois. We urge the Senate to show the same courage. Our record of wrongful convictions was not a warning that the system needed fixing. It was proof that we needed to stop this practice before the inevitable killing of an innocent person.
Neil Steinberg's Chicago Sun-Times latest column is, "Death penalty crumbles if you look at it."
The death penalty is not a practical matter.
It is not practical in that it does not affect the daily lives of the vast majority of people who, being neither murderers nor loved ones of the murdered, do not have the death penalty entering their lives directly, but rather in the way it shapes the society we all live in.
And how is that? Lately, in Illinois, not much. Again, practically-speaking, the state of Illinois has not held an execution in a decade, since then-Governor-now-incarcerated-felon George Ryan placed a moratorium on it. For practical purposes execution is already banned — what happened last week was the Illinois House voted to put into law what has for 10 years been our de facto policy.
Few seem to miss the death penalty. Law enforcement sorts say that it serves as a good tool when sweating suspects, and that may be true. But so would thumbscrews — usefulness to law enforcement, alone, is not much of an argument in favor of anything. And if lack of a death penalty has impeded law enforcement they certainly have been quiet about it.
Nor is the traditional argument that it is a deterrent seem valid, given that in the years without it, the murder rate has gone down.
Speaking for myself, in years past I was content to live in a country where those who committed the most heinous, evil acts were put to death. It felt like justice — and sometimes still feels like justice yet. Nobody misses Timothy McVeigh. I’m glad he’s dead, glad our country killed him, as punishment for blowing up the Murrah Federal Building. Ditto for John Wayne Gacy, and a rogue’s gallery of fiends and felons.
But. The death penalty is also one of the areas that, the more you look into it, the less comfortable you are (assuming, of course, you are the rare sort who processes information and then forms opinions, as opposed to the multitude who use opinion as a filter to keep away any information that might challenge your beliefs).
People are condemned to death unjustly, and while those condemnations are usually overturned, some cases have come frighteningly close to execution, and there seems at least one case — that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for the arson deaths of his three children — in which a completely innocent man was put to death for a crime he did not commit.
"Quinn Could Face Tough Death Penalty Decision," is the title of Adam Doster's post at Illinois Progress.
"I can't think of a more dramatic way to win a vote."
That's Jeremy Schroeder, executive director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (ICADP), basking in the glory of his organization's victory last Thursday night in the Illinois House. Two hours after a bill to abolish capital punishment in Illinois (SB 3539) was defeated by just one vote and placed on the calendar for postponed consideration, State Rep. Pat Verschoore (D-Rock Island) and lame duck State Reps. Bob Biggins (R-Elmhurst) and Mike Smith (D-Canton) changed their minds at the 11th hour and gave the chief sponsor, State Rep. Karen Yarbrough (D-Maywood), just the cushion she needed. "I was on both sides of this issue," Verschoore told the Illinois Statehouse News later that evening. "But then you think of the potential cost savings of this bill, and the state needs all of the savings we can get."
ICADP is hopeful that the State Senate will take up SB 3539 before the veto session winds down this week. Support in that chamber, which reconvenes today at 3 p.m., is said to be deeper than in the House. If it survives, the bill will head to Gov. Pat Quinn, who has expressed some reticence about eliminating the option.
Earlier coverage begins with the post, "More News Coverage From Illinois."
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