Next week, the Illinois State House is slated to vote on SB 3539 which now contains a House amendment from Rep Karen Yarbrough (D) which repeals Illinois' death penalty. The bill would then have to go back to the Senate, and then to Gov. Pat Quinn (D) who has not yet announced whether he would veto it.
Illinois has not executed anyone since Governor George Ryan (R) halted executions (and famously commuted all death row inmates at the time to life in prison) back in 2000. His successors in office have maintained the executive branch ban on executions, but since the law is still on the books, prosecutors have still sought, and juries have still imposed the death penalty. While the status quo is better than the State actively imposing capital punishment, in another sense it is the worst of both worlds, as in addition to still being prone to the issues I discussed here, Illinois also has to bear the costs of keeping people on Death Row and the necessary appeals as no convict can be sure the next Governor won't overturn the ban.
Nobody seems very sure whether the bill can pass though it appears to have the votes in the House, and with Democratic majority in the Senate and Illinois being a No-filibuster, majority rule state, it is at least possible. If you're interested in helping out, the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is having a lobby day on January 4th to try and push legislators to pass the repeal. It would be a significant liberal victory to have the fifth largest state make its de facto repeal permanent. Even having the vote is some kind of progress, indicating the issue is alive and on the agenda.
Forgive my late comment on it, but in early November, PBS' Frontline did a fantastic program titled The Confessions. If you haven't heard about the case (I hadn't), I'd really recommend watching or listening to the program, but to boil it down as short as possible, a woman named Michelle Moore-Bosko was raped and murdered in her Virginia apartment in 1997, and through a series of bad police and prosecutorial decisions, seven US sailors were wrongly dragged into it, and four were ultimately convicted on rape or murder charges and imprisoned by Virginia. They were eventually freed on a partial clemency by Governor Tim Kaine in 2009, having spent most of 12 years in prison.
All this happened despite the eventual (but still timely enough) confession of acting alone by a known sexually violent man who had no association with the accused sailors, and had the only DNA from the crime scene. The first sailor was implicated just by the random suspicious comment of someone in Michelle's building (where he also lived) during initial police canvassing and after he was induced to (falsely) confess by sheer psychological wear-down, one by one additional sailors were pulled in as each would be brought in, grilled for extended times by one detective with a long record of extracting confessions, and when their DNA did not actually match the crime scene, they were coerced to name additional people involved and re-state their confessions to match a growing list of suspects, which ultimately reached 8. The case took numerous absurd twists and turns and really the program does an excellent job showing how the State's case against the seven (three never convicted) strained credulity by the end, despite the confessions.
PBS covers many aspects of this preposterous travesty of justice, because it is obvious that many flaws in the criminal justice system aligned to create such a massive error. There is no monocausal explanation, a bad cop, bad prosecutors, bad supervisors, bad Judges and sloppy defence lawyers all played significant parts in the result, but if I had to name the factor which, if absent, would have prevented the outcome while still leading to the eventual conviction of the actual murderer, it is the Death Penalty.
From David Kaib's quick hit we learn the good news that New Mexico's legislature has passed a bill banning capital punishment, which now awaits Governor Bill Richardson's decision to sign or veto.
This is of course a postive step, and I'm hopeful that with his Presidential and Cabinet ambitions most likely doomed, due to his looming legal problems, that Richardson will (perhaps akin to former Illinois Gov. George Ryan) have a change of heart and sign the bill. New Mexico isn't alone, as several other states have death penalty repeals that have some level of legislative action beyond introduction.
However, the unfortunate aspect to this, is that it is all happening as a cost saving measure rather than from any decisive turn against the morality of the death penalty. In fact, capital punishment still polls very strongly in America, much stronger than in most other comparable wealthy democracies. In the 2006 GSS, the death penalty for murder was supported by even a bare majority of self identified liberals. So it's clear death penalty opponents have a lot of work to do to turn this around. Inside, I'm going to try and make a philisophical case against the death penalty. It's not wrong just because it's inefficient or expensive, it is fundamentally unjust and immoral.
Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Katie Halper On Thanksgiving, The Dallas Cowboys beat the Seattle Seahawks 34 to 9. And the day before, when Bush spared two innocent lives, he achieved his own victory of 16 to 1. When Bush pardoned Pumpkin AND Pecan, who were about to meet the same fate as the turkeys televised behind Sarah Palin, he could boast of having 16 presidential poultry pardons under his belt. But Bush has also compassionately conserved human life, once. During his six-year governorship and eight-year presidency, Bush has pardoned one death row inmate, denied clemency over 50 times, and signed death warrants for 155 people, many of whom were innocent, mentally retarded, juveniles, recipients of unfair trials, and/or represented by incompetent and often narcoleptic lawyers.
By Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California
A panel of experts, including 10 law enforcement officers and prosecutors, unanimously agrees that California's death penalty is utterly broken. To fix it, we'll need to spend over $200 million per year. The current failed system already costs over $137 million more each year than our alternative of permanent imprisonment. Today's report forces all Californians to ask: how much we are willing to pay for our death penalty when we have an alternative that punishes criminals and protects our communities without making us bankrupt?
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First, if we decide that we simply can't part with a system that we now know drains critical resources from public safety budgets, puts innocent lives at risk, harms murder victim family members, and is applied unfairly, then we need to commit to spending over $200 million in tax dollars every year to make the system operational on the most basic levels.
The Commission estimates that in order to make the system function, we would have to spend nearly $100 million more each year to pay for more prosecution and defense lawyers, and more court staff to handle the enormous volume of death penalty cases and appeals. When you add that to the money we already spend, it totals $217 million a year. On top of that, the State Auditor recently concluded that it will cost almost $400 million to build a new death row housing facility at San Quentin, on ground that is literally sinking into the sea.
Considering California's fiscal crisis, spending all of this money is not only unlikely, it's impossible.
And none of these proposed reforms would adequately address one of the most troubling flaws in California's death penalty, the racial and geographic disparities that call the very fairness and justice of the system into question. Despite evidence and testimony from several researchers indicating that race and place play a significant role in determining who lives and who dies, proposed reforms to address these issues are noticeably lacking from the Commission's report. Reforms that would begin to address those flaws would certainly cost more.
Our second option, according to the Commission, is to acknowledge that we have the most extreme death penalty statute in the country, resulting in an insupportably large death row population, and that we can't afford a system this big and bloated.
We all agree that we want a criminal justice system that delivers justice fairly. The overwhelming demands of our current death penalty system, however, overburden courts, lawyers and public safety officials at every level, jeopardizing the foundations of our justice system. The Commission suggests that we could limit the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty in order to ease some of the burden. This would still cost more than $100 million a year, depending on how much smaller we make the "smaller death penalty."
While both of these options provide a healthy dose of reality about how large and unmanageable our death penalty is, the Commission report also highlights the fact that we already pay many millions of dollars on the current failed death penalty, and that a cheaper, more effective system is not only feasible, it's already in place.
Few people realize that condemning someone to permanent imprisonment costs California taxpayers millions of dollars less than sentencing him or her to death. We have had the option of permanent imprisonment for as long as we have had the death penalty, and it's proven itself to be a more functional system that serves as a severe, but cost effective, punishment.
Which brings us to our third option, according to the Commission: replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment until death, and save millions of dollars for public safety programs that actually work to punish criminals, protect the public and help victims. This would cost us less than $12 million, a savings of more than $200 million a year over option one.
The Commission does not come out and officially endorse this or any other option. In some sense, that's a cop out. On the other hand, the Commission puts the decision right where it should be: in the hand of the voters. It's time for those of us who are writing the checks to fund the system if to ask if it's really worth the price.
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