Our Opinion: Abolish death penalty

Springfield State Journal-Register

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Last week New Jersey became the first state to repeal its death penalty statute since a 1976 United States Supreme Court ruling that restored capital punishment.
Unlike Illinois, New Jersey had not been plagued by wrongful convictions that put innocent people on death row. New Jersey also had not executed anyone, though it did build a chamber where capital punishment could have been administered if a case had ever withstood the appeals process.
For the record, Illinois executed 12 people and saw 13 death row inmates exonerated. That dismal record prompted Gov. George Ryan in early 2000 to enact a moratorium on executions. That moratorium still stands. Shortly before leaving office in 2003, Ryan commuted the sentences of all death row inmates to life in prison. Since then, 11 people have been added to death row.
Dealing with those cases, and those that will inevitably follow, will be expensive and time-consuming. Maintaining a separate death row drains the resources of the Illinois Department of Corrections, and the required appeals further clog the courts. These matters — the practical considerations of capital punishment — played a large role in convincing the New Jersey Legislature and Gov. John Corzine to abolish the death penalty there.
We believe Illinois legislators should take a serious look at the reasoning behind New Jersey’s action. It could be a model for a similar action here, an action we believe is long overdue.
Illinois’ death penalty law has become so cumbersome now that prosecutors sometimes avoid seeking it in order to deprive a defendant of the additional defense resources available exclusively to those facing capital punishment. So perverse is Illinois law in this area that Herb Whitlock remains in prison on a 20-year-old murder conviction while Randy Steidl, convicted in the same case, is now free. The difference? Steidl was sentenced to death and therefore had greater resources to expose the many errors that led to his conviction.
But New Jersey’s death penalty abolition bill also calls capital punishment “inconsistent with evolving standards of decency.” While we oppose the death penalty on practical grounds, our opposition as a matter of morality is much stronger.
Imposition of the death penalty is notoriously capricious, with racial, social and economic factors often becoming contributing factors in whether a jury decides a defendant should be put to death or spend life in prison. A system in which a jury decides whether a defendant is guilty of a crime and then must decide whether that crime qualifies as death-worthy introduces an element of subjectivity that should not be present in deciding whether someone lives or dies.
Fundamentally, our opposition is rooted in the issue of justice vs. revenge. As a society, we can define justice through the laws we make and administer it through our courts. We can’t define revenge, nor can we as a society administer it, but often that is what we seek in applying the death penalty.
Someday Illinois will have to decide what to do about its death penalty moratorium. We can’t go on forever in a state of capital punishment limbo, yet we can’t envision a governor proudly announcing the resumption of a system that at one time would have killed 13 innocent people. For all the safeguards we put in place, the legacy of Illinois’ 12-to-13 executed-to-exonerated ratio will endure.
We admire New Jersey for having the courage and conscience to go first. We hope it emboldens lawmakers in Illinois to do the same.