Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

Governor holds up Death Row reform bill
Blagojevich wants police perjury clause deleted

By Christi Parsons; Chicago Tribune ; July 30, 2003

A far-reaching death penalty reform measure passed by the Illinois General Assembly this spring will not go into effect until at least fall, after Gov. Rod Blagojevich refused to sign it into law Tuesday and sent it back to lawmakers with a single revision.

Key lawmakers immediately pledged to try to override Blagojevich's amendment, but they won't be able to do that until the legislature next convenes, most likely for its fall veto session in November.

In a letter to lawmakers, Blagojevich said he would approve the entire law except for one provision that is highly unpopular among police organizations around the state. The measure would set up an administrative procedure by which police officers could lose their certification for committing perjury, a change Blagojevich said would rob officers of the due-process rights they would get in the courts.

"If a police officer is believed to have committed perjury, charge them with perjury and prosecute them like everyone else," Blagojevich said in a written statement released by his staff while he is on vacation. "Frankly, treating the police worse than everyone else is offensive."

The governor called the rest of the legislation "an important step to try to build trust and integrity into our criminal justice system." But Senate President Emil Jones (D-Chicago) said the perjury rules "go to the heart" of any meaningful reform package because they address the critical role that police integrity and honesty must play in the capital justice process. House sponsors said they would support Jones' override if it is successful.

If both chambers agree by a three-fifths majority to override Blagojevich, the law would take effect right away as originally passed. And lawmakers could always agree by a simple majority to accept the governor's editing.

But if lawmakers can't agree on either option, the bill would fail, and they would have to start their reform effort all over again.

Several reform advocates predict the law will take effect this fall one way or the other, because lawmakers voted by such overwhelming margins to pass it this spring and clearly want to see it enacted.

"I won't say he has jeopardized the bill because I know we have the votes to override," said Sen. John Cullerton (D-Chicago), the chief sponsor and author of the measure. "He has just delayed the effective date, and I'm very disappointed about that."

Rep. Tom Cross (R-Oswego), the House Republican leader and sponsor of the measure in that chamber, also predicted passage.

"We're going to go forward with whatever the Senate does, whether it's to override or accept the changes," Cross said. "The rest of it is so important that we can't let it fail."

The comprehensive death penalty package was a significant achievement after years of study and debate kicked off by Gov. George Ryan in January 2000. Concerned that the state had released 13 Death Row inmates because of serious questions about their convictions, Ryan imposed an internationally noted moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois and appointed a commission to scour the capital justice system for errors.

Legislators debated the commission's recommendations for months before incorporating most of them in the current legislation and passing them in spring with very little dissent. The bill was designed to weed out errors in every step of the process, from the way police investigate a crime to the rules that govern post-conviction appeals.

The bill would change the way police do their jobs by requiring them to disclose their field notes for later scrutiny. At the court level, it would set up pretrial hearings at which judges determine the credibility of jailhouse informants before they testify in front of a jury.

It also would set up a presumption that people with an IQ lower than 75 are mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.

And it would give the justices of the Illinois Supreme Court the power to overturn a death sentence merely because they think it isn't merited in a particular case. Now, the court can throw out a death sentence only because of specific procedural errors, not simply because justices decide that it would be a fundamental failure of justice to let it proceed. Advocates for death penalty reform had hoped that Blagojevich, a self-proclaimed champion of reform, would sign the measure and put it on the statute books right away.

But Blagojevich was noncommittal. A former prosecutor now closely aligned with police unions, Blagojevich has been careful not to offend the law enforcement community.

Law enforcement officials worry because the administrative panel made up of police experts would apply lower standards of proof than would a judge following the stricter standards of the criminal court system.

"We're not here to protect bad cops," said Greg Sullivan, executive director of the Illinois Sheriffs' Association. "If they're going to lie, they need to be prosecuted, plain and simple. But they don't need to go to an administrative hearing that takes away their right to work the rest of their lives. Either convict them or let it go."

Police complained that the administrative hearings would become forums for frivolous complaints.

"You're going to have every defendant in a homicide case making a charge that the police lied on the stand," Sullivan said. "They have nothing to lose. To set a lower standard of proof for a police officer than you would for anyone else who testifies in the trial is bad public policy."

Blagojevich took those concerns to heart, weighing until the last minute whether to sign them into law. In fact, Cullerton said he got a call from an aide to Blagojevich on Friday saying that the governor would sign the bill outright without any changes.
Later in the day, though, Blagojevich's staff said it wasn't a done deal.

When Jones got that word, he said, he put in a phone call.

"I had a long talk with the governor this morning and explained to him that this is at the heart of the reform legislation," Jones said Tuesday. "I urged him not to veto it, but he is bowing down to the Fraternal Order of Police. His action sent a signal he's trying to prevent police officers who perjure themselves in homicide cases from losing their jobs."

Cullerton also talked to the governor's staff.

"This provision stands for the proposition that, if a police officer is proven by a vote of a jury of his peers to have committed perjury by clear and convincing evidence, that he ought to have his badge pulled," Cullerton said. "How can you be against that?"

Many of the state's most ardent reform advocates don't really care about the provision.

"Five years from now, when this is law, no one is going to remember that this perjury provision isn't in there," said Lawrence Marshall, legal director of the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions and a professor of law at the Northwestern University law school. "Everybody's going to remember the dramatic parts that are in there. The changes this will make in so many areas are significant to Illinois and a harbinger of what kinds of reforms are on the horizon across the country."