Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

Imagine for a moment the State of Illinois is operating a parachute factory that's turning out one defective parachute for every 21 good ones. This is a rough analogy to the situation that Gov. George Ryan confronted with the death penalty two years ago: The state's capital justice factory was sending innocent men to Death Row at that troubling rate, at least.

A parachute manufacturer faced with such statistics shuts down the assembly line immediately. When fatal errors are infecting the process, it's irresponsible to make more parachutes until you fix that process. But Ryan didn't have the power to shut off the machine. He works outside the plant, so to speak, as the final quality-control inspector.

And his celebrated moratorium on executions was analogous to an announcement that even though we're going to continue to manufacture parachutes, Inspector Ryan will let them pile up in the warehouse because he's not letting anyone use them until the factory is fixed.

Critics groused that this made no sense--that Ryan could have prevented a tragedy by simply intensifying the inspection process and erring on the side of any doubt in order to make triply sure that each parachute was good even as he was working to tweak the manufacturing process.

Perhaps. But Ryan was looking for a bigger, symbolic gesture that would serve to focus attention on the flaws in the state's figurative parachute factory and bring urgency to the effort to fix it. And the gesture worked. Various commissions, panels and newspaper investigative reports have since identified numerous ways the system fails, and Illinois now appears to be well on the way toward major reform.

Numerous instances of miscarriage of justice that have come to light in recent years have shown us that death penalty cases in Illinois have been infected by inept and corrupt police work, junk science, prosecutorial misconduct, lying and mistaken witnesses, incompetent defense lawyering and false confessions. Thirteen convictions have already crumbled and others are sure to collapse in the near future. Ryan's disclosure Friday that he intends to review all 159 death sentences in Illinois and consider reducing them to life-without-parole was a surprise only because of the timing.

Most observers thought he'd wait at least until after the March 19 primary to state the obvious necessity to look back. Because Ryan--and, in fact, all of us in Illinois--are now faced with a warehouse full of parachutes that were manufactured the old way. No matter how we fix the machine today, the old parachutes don't meet our standards in so many ways that, in most cases, it would be better to throw them out and start again than to allow anyone to leap from an airplane with one.

Ryan could order each old parachute disassembled and remade from scratch--new capital trials under the new rules--though that would be impossible for some of the older parachutes and exceedingly expensive.

He could also order that we simply keep the old parachutes in storage forever and commute all existing death sentences. Either way, he ought to make the following observation: With enough new safeguards and error-detection mechanisms we can probably reduce the incidence of defective Illinois parachutes to 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.

But given the inherent human fallibility in the system, we're never going to get it even close to perfect. And when it comes to a matter of life and death when there is no downside to erring on the side of caution, perfection must be our standard.

It would be a bold statement, one that would dominate debate for the entire political season and perhaps even backfire on abolitionists. But maybe, the governor might say, maybe the state shouldn't be in the parachute business at all.