Last Friday Illinois Gov. George Ryan announced that he is seriously considering the commutation of all current Illinois death sentences. The announcement is meaningful without being entirely shocking: The death penalty debate in Illinois has been especially active for the last few years, prompting the moratorium in January 2000.
Ryan tempered his most recent announcement, though, by suggesting that fairer legislation regarding capital punishment could influence his decision. Perhaps if state legislators could make the death penalty easier to swallow by smoothing out some of the grosser violations of reason and justice the governor could let the institution be.
He would be making a terrible mistake.
Unlike Wisconsin, which outlawed the death penalty more than 100 years ago, Illinois has struggled with the issue'and with good reason given its record. Since the state reintroduced the death penalty in 1977, there have been more exonerations than actual executions. In all, 13 Illinois death row inmates have been freed in recent years after revelations of trial misconduct or new evidence. Twelve of these were largely the result of long-term, extra-judicial volunteer projects intent on saving the wrongly convicted. Without such projects, likely these men would have remained on death row or have suffered lethal injection already.
In addition to an ever-lengthening wrongful conviction record, Illinois boasts an alarming overrepresentation of racial minorities on its death row. More than 52 percent of death row inmates nationwide are African-American or Latino, a horrifying statistic. But in Illinois, 69 percent are minorities, giving it one of the worst records in the country.
Outright failures of the justice system also seem to pepper Illinois' record. While the 12 men executed since 1977 include the easily dehumanized likes of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, they also include Girvies Davis, a man whose case was riddled with contradictions and outright abuses. Convicted based on a supposed handwritten list of crimes and a signed confession, Davis was a total illiterate who maintained that he had been coerced to sign it at gunpoint. A member of the police later admitted that the confession had not been read to Davis before he was asked to sign it. Davis, an African-American, was convicted by an all-white jury, from which three African-American jurors had been excluded by prosecutorial peremptory challenge'a practice that is now deemed unconstitutional. Despite these and other problems raised by students at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Davis was executed May 17, 1995.
At this point, the problems surrounding capital punishment have to be clear even to supporters. Now all that remains to be seen'and the problem that Ryan faces'is if these problems are resolvable.
There is a variety of pending legislation seeking to address the most problematic features of capital cases, much of it very thoughtful. One, HB4243, demands \higher standards of certainty,"" preventing capital cases based on a single eyewitness or where a juror has ""residual doubt."" Other new standards include those for ""jailhouse snitch"" testimony requiring corroboration, new rules for forensic testing and requiring video recording of interrogation and confessions in capital cases. The best one asks for a moratorium on the death penalty while a study on the effect of race and location is completed. But however thoughtful they may be, all these reforms combined will never resolve Illinois' problems.
That's because the roots of the unfair application of the death penalty in Illinois and everywhere lie far deeper than whether testimony of a jailhouse snitch is allowed. They lie deep in still-severe racial and economic inequalities that reforms may address but certainly not alleviate, and deeper still in the inevitable fallibility of any human system. A total overhaul of state law surrounding the death penalty may very well reduce the most horrifying or embarrassing statistics, but cannot guarantee innocent life will not be taken.
In fact, no matter how restrictive the laws, they almost certainly will.
The real decision that Ryan is facing is whether or not there are an acceptable number of wrongful executions. Right now, the problems are so glaring that everyone is paying attention. A narrow majority of people in this country may support the death penalty, but it has grown more and more difficult to ignore its inequities and failures. The most shocking thing Ryan suggested last Friday was that if those inequities and failures were not quite so clear, the death penalty could remain viable for Illinois'that reform may make the death penalty more palatable.
Back in 2000, Ryan told the country, ""I cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of innocent life. ... Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate.' The fact is, countless innocent men have already died at the hands of the state'and more will follow if the death penalty is not abolished.
If the taking of one innocent life pushes the threshold of acceptability, then the death penalty must be abolished altogether. The risks will always remain too high, the administration demonstrably inequitable, and the results irrevocable.
