State Representative Mary O’Brien, a Democrat from Watseka, chairs the Illinois House committee on criminal justice. Given the Democratic Party’s takeover of Springfield and her own landslide reelection in November (she received 70 percent of the vote), you might suspect O’Brien and seven committee members passed a bill to abolish the death penalty last Friday because they believed it has a chance of becoming law. But you would be wrong. O’Brien, for one, is in favor of the death penalty. She voted for the bill only because, she says, it’s an issue worth debating. “The chance of the bill becoming law,” she says, “is practically nothing.”
This Thursday, March 13, O’Brien will be speaking at a UIS-sponsored forum on capital punishment. Her topic is “the politics of capital punishment reform.” She says she will mostly talk about why people who push for reforms in Illinois’ justice system are accused of being “soft on crime,” the equivalent of calling someone a wimp. While O’Brien says no one in the General Assembly is soft on crime, the fact is that “Illinois is too much of a law and order state. No matter how good reforms are, they’ll be considered soft.”
Last year former Governor George Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment released its report on how to fix Illinois’ death penalty (the commission’s co-chair, former U.S. attorney Thomas Sullivan, will also be speaking at the UIS forum). The commission spent two years studying the state’s capital punishment system and, in April 2002, proposed 85 ways to fix it. The commission was formed by Ryan after he placed a moratorium on the death penalty three years ago. By then, 13 Illinois inmates on death row had been proven innocent, one more than the number executed since the death penalty was re-instituted here in 1977. Governor Rod Blagojevich has pledged to keep the moratorium in place until reforms are passed.
Among the commission’s suggestions is a measure that’s already making its way through legislative committees after receiving support from the Illinois State Police and the Illinois Sheriff’s Association: videotaped confessions admissible in court. Several bills dealing with police and prosecutorial conduct have also been introduced. Other commission recommendations include limiting the number of death-penalty offenses from 20 to just a few; more training for trial judges and lawyers; requiring a judge to agree to a jury’s decision to execute; a review of each death penalty case by the Illinois Supreme Court; allowing more types of scientific evidence in court; and barring death-penalty judgments in cases that depend on questionable witnesses, such as jailhouse snitches.
A slight majority of commission members favored abolishing the death penalty, either because of moral concerns, or because they believed no death-penalty system can guarantee perfect results, or because the expense of pursuing capital cases outweighs the benefits. Days before he left office–and after the General Assembly did nothing with the commission’s suggestions–Ryan issued his blanket clemency to every one of Illinois’ 167 condemned inmates. Almost to the end, Ryan said he had hoped the General Assembly would enact at least some of his reforms. When asked whether he would have issued his blanket commutation if the reforms had passed, Ryan replied: “Maybe not. I don’t know.”
According to O’Brien, this time the legislature is taking the commission’s recommendations seriously: “We start with which ones are most critical, which are most likely to be implemented, and which ones are most cost-effective.” Still, what’s being lost, she says, is a focus on the criminal justice system. By placing such emphasis on capital punishment, she says, efforts to rewrite the criminal code have been scaled back. Perhaps that’s the biggest political challenge of all: how do you fix the death penalty while leaving untouched the very system that created the problem?
The UIS forum, “Capital Punishment Reform in Illinois After George Ryan,” takes place Thursday, March 13, from 6:45 to 8 p.m. in the Studio Theatre on the first floor of the Public Affairs Center. The forum can be heard live on WUIS, 91.9 FM. For more info, call 206-6574.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2003.
