State Bar Wants to Kill Death Penalty
Add comment July 1st, 2008
The Illinois State Bar Association has voted to support abolition of the death penatly, the lawyer group said Monday.
The vote came after presentations by former federal prosecutor Thomas Sullivan,
past president of the ISBA Terrence K. Hegarty, and the President of the Illinois
State’s Attorneys Association, Joseph Birkett, State’s Attorney of DuPage County.After quoting from the dissent of retired Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses
Harrison, newly-installed ISBA president Jack C. Carey of Belleville, said,“The application of the death penalty in Illinois has been demonstrated to be
flawed beyond any doubt. Our position is that the death penalty is not fixable
and should be discontinued. To do otherwise would invite the grossest
miscarriage of justice imaginable, the death of an innocent person.”
Though he seldom gets credit for it, Justice Harrison was a pioneer in the movement to quash capital punishment in this state.
Five years before former Gov. George Ryan commuted the death sentences of every condemned inmate in Illinois, Harrison authored a dissent in the case of People v. Bull in which he argued that the death penalty is unconstitutional.
The result, inevitably, will be that innocent persons are going to be sentenced to death and be executed in Illinois. A sentencing scheme which permits such horrific and irrevocable results cannot meet the requirements of the eighth and fourteenth amendments to the United States Constitution (U.S. Const., amends. VIII, XIV) or article I, section 2, of the Illinois Constitution (Ill. Const. 1970, art. I, §2).
It is no answer to say that we are doing the best we can. If this is the best our state can do, we have no business sending people to their deaths. As outraged as we may feel personally over the terrible acts committed by the defendant in this case, that is no justification for perpetuating a system that violates our most basic constitutional principles.
Before any of us gets too righteous about what a despicable character defendant is, we should also stop for a moment and reflect on how easy it was to condemn an individual such as Rolando Cruz, who was ultimately determined to be innocent. This is not to suggest that the defendant in this case was not actually guilty either. My point is simply that when a system is as prone to error as our is, we should not be making irrevocable decisions about any human life.
My colleagues are decent and good people. Just as the execution of an innocent person is inevitable, it is inevitable that one day the majority will no longer be able to deny that the Illinois death penalty scheme, as presently administered, is profoundly unjust. When that day comes, as it must, my colleagues will see what they have allowed to happen, and they will feel ashamed.
