Moratorium good; end of death penalty is better

Feb 19, 2008
Rockford Register Star

We appreciate Gov. Rod Blagojevichs refusal to resume executions in
Illinois, despite loud requests from people who think the state's death
machine has been idle long enough. The governor said he's not persuaded yet
that reforms put in place in recent years have fixed the system.

If he's waiting to be 100 percent certain the death penalty will be applied
accurately and fairly in all cases, he'll be waiting forever. That's fine
with us. The only foolproof and moral option, in our view, is to abolish the
death penalty. Period.

Some are not content to do that or to wait any longer to resume executions.
They say that because the state still has a law on the books, it ought to be
used.

"We shouldn't ask jurors to impose the death penalty and not have the
courage to carry it out," said state Rep. Dennis Reboletti of Elmhurst, a
proponent of ending the state's eight-year moratorium on executions. DuPage
County State's Attorney Joe Birkett joined Reboletti in demanding that
executions be resumed.

The answer to that dilemma is to stop asking juries to sentence people to
death. And courage has nothing to do with it. The applicable words might be
fairness, accuracy and morality. The death penalty will never meet those
standards.

The lethal injection gurneys have been parked since 2000 when then-Gov.
George Ryan halted executions because of a high error rate on death penalty
convictions.

Between 1977 and 2000, the state had executed 12 people. During that same
period, 13 inmates were released because of wrongful convictions! That
horrendous accuracy rate led Ryan to commute to life in prison the death
sentences of all 167 inmates on Illinois' death row.

He also appointed a commission to study the issue and suggest reforms. The
list of needed reforms was lengthy, and the Legislature adopted much of it.
One of the more publicized reforms required videotaped interrogations of
murder suspects. The legislation contained other reforms, including a
provision that would allow judges to rule out the death penalty as a
sentencing option when the cases rested on a single eyewitness or police
informant, the latter being particularly unreliable.

Experts on the commission, however, said the reforms adopted by the
Legislature didn't go far enough to ensure the death penalty was fairly and
accurately applied.

Arguments Reboletti and Birkett make in favor of resuming executions also
can be used to argue that state-sanctioned killing should never be resumed.

They want the governor to review each death penalty case to make sure it
passes muster for fairness and accuracy before giving a green light to
execution. That argument merely emphasizes how subjective this process is
and how justice can be applied so differently, depending on the skills of
the prosecutor and the defense attorney, the makeup of a jury, the color,
income level and even occupation of the victim and the defendant. The
reforms did not iron out those wrinkles.

Birkett argued that even if the governor lifted the moratorium, nobody
could be executed for at least 10 years, given the appeals process, etc.
That rationale only emphasizes the length and expense of death penalty
cases.

In addition, they are "jumping the gun," so to speak, in calling for the
moratorium to be lifted. A state committee that has been reviewing the
effectiveness of reforms is supposed to give a report later this year.

It seems uncommonly bloodthirsty not to even wait for that.