Recent News
20th innocent person removed from Illinois's death row.
During this last year, quite a bit happened in terms of the death penalty in Illinois and the US.
On April 8, Nathson Fields was acquitted in a retrial of a murder commited in 1984. Eyewitnesses in the case contradicted each other, and some recanted their own testimony, claiming police or gang intimidation. Fields and his codefendant Earl Hawkins were tried, convicted and sentenced to death by one man, Cook County Judge Thomas Maloney. A few years later, Maloney was convicted of taking bribes in murder trials, including capital cases, and was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison.
On July 7, Ronald Kitchen and his codefendant Marvin Reeves were granted a new trial for a 1988 murder. A few hours later, they were free men. The original evidence against them included confessions beaten out of them by the notorious Commander Burge and his men, as well as a snitch who claimed that Kitchen and Reeves had confessed to him by phone. Records later showed that these phone calls never took place, and that prosecutors had concealed the deal they had made with the snitch, which shortened his own prison sentence. Left with such “evidence,” prosecutors dropped the charges, after having fought against the new trial for six years.
In August, Texans got some disturbing news as their state had almost certainly executed an innocent man. Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004, despite growing doubts about the evidence used to convict him of setting the fire that killed his children. This summer, an independent expert commissioned by the state found no credible evidence that the fire was arson, and that the original 1991 investigation had been shoddy even by the scientific standards of the time.
The overall state of forensic science in U.S. courts may be no better according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences. The report concluded that U.S. courts were routinely relying on forensic experts who were poorly trained and who exaggerated the reliability of largely unproven techniques.
January 2010 will mark the tenth anniversary of Illinois’ moratorium on executions. Earlier this year, Illinois’ newly elected governor pledged to continue the moratoratorium. Gov. Pat Quinn told reporters he was not against the death penalty, but that it could only be carried out if there were “zero tolerance for error.” We’re pleased with the governor’s decision to keep the moratorium, but we urge him and our other political leaders to consider abolishing the death panelty as it will never be error-free.
