Our Opinion: Do not resume executions

Springfield Journal-Register

February 19, 2008

LAST WEEK, state Rep. Dennis Reboletti, R-Elmhurst, and DuPage County State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett teamed up to urge Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift the state’s death penalty moratorium and resume the practice of capital punishment.

Reboletti has introduced a House resolution asking the governor to end the state’s eight-year moratorium on executions. He and Birkett said Illinois’ capital punishment system, overhauled after an examination by a 14-member commission, has been fixed.

We welcome the debate this resolution may bring on the Illinois House floor, but we believe lawmakers should arrive at a different conclusion than that of Reboletti and and Birkett.

WE BELIEVE that any system that logged a record of 12 executions and 13 wrongful convictions should not be fixed. It should be scrapped.

The problems identified by Gov. George Ryan’s commission certainly made the system in Illinois more likely to sentence innocent people to death. Coerced confessions, insufficient legal representation, questionable testimony from jailhouse snitches and lack of DNA resources were among the problems the commission found and Illinois law addressed.

But we think those were mere symptoms of the real problem. The real problem is the death penalty itself, which will always use the weight of emotions to tip the scales of justice.

Scott Turow, the best-selling author and former federal prosecutor who served on Ryan’s commission, outlined the problem brilliantly in a 2003 essay in The New Yorker magazine.

“Capital punishment is supposed to be applied only to the most heinous crimes, but it is precisely those cases which, because of the strong feelings of repugnance they evoke, most thoroughly challenge the detached judgment of all participants in the legal process — police, prosecutors, judges, and juries,” Turow writes. (The full article can be found by searching for “Turow” in the archive section of www.newyorker.com.)

Turow points out that the wrongly accused are particularly susceptible to landing on death row because they are unlikely to accept plea bargains with lesser sentences for crimes they did not commit. They demand trials, then face juries that — by Supreme Court ruling — can’t empanel anyone who voices opposition to capital punishment.

WE ALSO FIND an ugly irony in Birkett’s involvement in this call to resume executions.

Birkett is now seeking the death penalty for Brian Dugan in the 1983 kidnapping, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. Perhaps more than any other, the Nicarico case became synonymous with wrongful prosecution in Illinois when two men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, were wrongfully sentenced to death. Dugan had confessed to the Nicarico murder when the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office embarked on a second trial of Cruz and Hernandez. Eventually, three DuPage County prosecutors and four police officers were indicted — and later acquitted — for their handling of the case.

Birkett was not involved in the Cruz/Hernandez prosecutions, but he was an assistant state’s attorney in the DuPage office during the process. His exposure to those cases should have taught him how public pressure for revenge can impinge on the judicial system’s duty to impose justice.

IN THEIR press conference last week, Birkett and Reboletti said even if the moratorium were lifted today, Illinois would not see an execution for 10 years due to legal appeals guaranteed to Illinois’ 13 current death row inmates. In our view, that is all the more reason to stop pursuing executions. The appeals process is cumbersome and expensive, as is the process of housing prisoners on death row. New Jersey decided as much in December and abolished capital punishment.

In Illinois, though, we think any decision on capital punishment need only come down to the state’s horrid record. A state that measured 12 executions against 13 near executions of innocent people should not ever purport to restart a “just” system of capital punishment.