• Do we need it to provide ultimate punishment to the worst murderers? Only 1-2% of convicted murderers in Illinois are sentenced to death. The other 98% are sentenced to life terms or less. The murders committed by the 2% on death row are no more heinous than those committed by the 98% who did not get death.
  
  In fact, if you were to try to predict which convicted murderers are likely to get the death penalty, you would not look at who was the worst criminal and which murder was the most heinous. You would look at the county in which the murder was committed, the judge sitting on the case, the quality of the defense lawyer, the race and economic class of the defendant, the race of the victim, and whether the defendant is suffering from a mental disturbance. These factors are, of course, not supposed to be the bases for imposing the death penalty.

• Do we need it for deterrence? Virtually all studies agree that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. Our neighboring states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa have no death penalty, and all have lower murder rates than Illinois.
  In fact, no country that has the death penalty has experienced a diminishment of the worst crimes. Others, like Canada, where it has been abolished, have experienced a 20% reduction.
  
  
• Do we need it for the safety of our citizens? Now that we can impose a sentence of life without possibility of parole and we have built a half-filled super-max prison, we know that we can be safe without sentencing people to death, and that personnel in our prisons can be safe.
  
  
• Do we need it to save money? On the contrary, all studies show that it costs between three and five times as much to administer the death penalty as it would to try and sentence someone to a life sentence (calculating 40 years as the average time a “lifer” will survive in prison).
  
  Illinois currently spends approximately $35 to $40 million dollars each year to add about ten people to Death Row, above and beyond what it would cost to sentence them to natural life in prison without parole. We spend these millions so that we can execute a tiny fraction of convicted murderers ten or fifteen years down the road, with great fanfare and hand-wrenching, rather than simply force them to live out a miserable existence in a maximum security prison, until they die in relative obscurity.
  
  Do we really want to waste additional millions by implementing costly reforms to prop up the dubious institution of capital punishment? Rather than throw good money after bad on the death penalty, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to take the money we now spend on capital cases and direct it to programs that might actually reduce the level of violent crime in our society? Can't we better use that money to hire more police officers, improve education, or provide better prenatal care to at-risk infants?
  
  
• Do we need it to provide closure to victims’ families? We surely know that the death of a loved one can never bring closure. On the contrary, capital punishment encourages family members to focus their existence on seeing the state kill the killers, in the belief that the execution, if and when it comes, will somehow make them feel better. To the extent that punishment provides some solace to the family of the victim, surely permanent incarceration that is not subject to several years of appeals provides more finality to a family than does several years of litigation – not to speak of endless publicity -- that necessary attends capital cases.
  Should the state assure aggrieved people the satisfaction of such "closure" if the price is continuing a system that almost certainly executes some innocent persons?
  
  
• Do we need the death penalty to enable our legislators to retain the support of their constituents? Here the picture has shifted completely. The latest polls show that when presented with the alternative of permanent incarceration, at least an equal number of (and in one poll, more) persons polled preferred the alternative. And when presented with the cost differential, surely even more would prefer the alternative.
  
  Moreover, a recent St. Louis Post Dispatch poll found that 2/3 of Illinois voters would either favor a candidate who had voted to abolish the death penalty or would not care about a candidate’s position on that issue.

The death penalty process is, and always will be, prone to fatal mistakes. It's sometimes corrupt, often arbitrary and racist, and always costly. It is not a deterrent, and we do not need to keep our citizens safe.

That being the case, why do we want to retain a system that does not deter crime, wastes resources and risks being applied to innocent persons? What is our need for the death penalty that impels us to go against the wave of revulsion felt by so many nations against executions, and to join the “axis of evil” – Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- in clinging to this form of punishment? Why should we be killing our own citizens when there are adequate alternatives to protect society, punish the guilty, and prevent crimes of violence?