Not really. But this is serious and urgent.
The opportunity comes to Illinois this week but this has powerful implications for the nation. Just yesterday a committee in the Illinois House voted 4-3 along party lines to approve the bill for a full vote. This is a bill that has an amendment that will abolish the death penalty. A vote will likely happen in the Illinois House and Senate this week.
According to the bill's sponsor:
The measure could come to a House floor vote as early as this afternoon. ``I'm still counting votes. Last night we had 58,'' said the sponsor, state Rep. Karen Yarbrough, D-Broadview. It needs 60 for House passage, and then would move to the Senate.
Please call your Illinois Representative and Senator today. People from other states can rec this diary to keep it in view. Please rec and read on for more background...
Illinois has had a moratorium to hold back executions since 2000. It was declared by Gov. George Ryan and has since been upheld by Gov. Blagojevich and Gov. Quinn (current gov). The idea was to reform the system so that the death penalty would be fair. More people are coming to the realization that the death penalty can never be fair. The system is not fixed:
Today’s reality is as mixed and melancholy as the legacy of Mr. Ryan, the Republican who had an honorable epiphany on capital punishment but was sent to prison on corruption charges prompted by a more ignoble streak.
"It doesn’t look too fixed to me," said Leigh B. Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law and a member of the Illinois Capital Reform Study Committee. Created by the legislature in 2003, the committee is headed by Thomas P. Sullivan, a Chicago lawyer, and just issued its sixth and final report to deafening news media silence.
The report found that taxpayers spend huge sums on prosecution of an inordinate number of death-penalty cases, though we’ve seen 18 death sentences since 2003; that prosecutors seek the penalty as a bargaining ploy in pursuit of a lesser guilty plea and sentence, and that $64 million has been spent on civil damage awards to men whose death row convictions were reversed.
In addition, a related law review article by Mrs. Bienen details dyspepsia-inducing costs via data she procured from the state and Cook County treasurer’s offices.
Since 2000, she learned, $100 million in taxpayer money has been spent via the Capital Litigation Trust Fund. That honey pot was meant to ensure defense counsel in capital cases, especially in places where public defender offices aren’t staffed adequately and must enlist private lawyers.
But prosecutors made sure that the fund would also pay for their often-ample nonsalary expenses, including those for investigators, not just for private defense counsel and the nonsalary expenses of public defenders.
The Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee of the Commission assigned to study this and to which Ms. Bienen was a member has its final report here. After all the time spent in Illinois studying the situation, even system failures known in 2002 are still not fixed:
At the final report release, CPRSC chair Sullivan said, "After six years of study and analysis, the Committee found several issues which still should be addressed in the Illinois capital punishment system, many the very same as those identified in April 2002 by the Governor’s Commission. We also found that there is a tremendous additional cost entailed when the death penalty is sought, and what appears to be a trend by prosecutors to ask for the death penalty in order to shift costs from the local counties to the State, and to increase their bargaining power in negotiations for pleas of guilty."
Just maybe it is inherently faulty thinking to assume there can be a fair system under which the death penalty can be applied. More and more support of that view is coming forward.
The chief sponsor of Bill SB3539, Amendment 1 is Karen Yarbrough:
Scott Turow and Rick Warden also have some insightful things to say. See the links to their videos at the bottom of this diary.
As Bob Herbert noted this week former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has strong thoughts about this, why it doesn't work and why it is not constitutional:
In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional.
As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion "that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,’ had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria."
In Illinois, abolishment of the death penalty, SB3539, Amendment 1 is supported by:
The Illinois State Bar Association
The Springfield State Journal-Register
The American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International
Former Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Harrison
The Rockford Register Star
The Chicago Tribune
Scott Turow
Rob Warden
The Catholic Conference of Illinois
Title updates:
- first published as: Action: Abolish the death penalty in Illinois this week.
- next tried: Obama to abolish death penalty today!!!!
- finally: Obama and Boehner to jointly abolish death penalty today!!!!