Last week, the Illinois Senate voted 32-25 in favor of legislation permanently banning the death penalty in our state. The state House had already passed the measure, so the fate of the criminal justice system’s most controversial tool now lays squarely in the hands of Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn. The Daily strongly urges Quinn to sign the bill.
It is unusual for this newspaper to comment on controversial issues of such national and statewide prominence as the death penalty. But we feel involved and even qualified enough to add our voice to the discussion on this one due to Northwestern’s strong ties to the debate.
In his floor speech supporting the bill, state Sen. Jeff Schoenberg, D-Evanston, referenced a recent law review article by NU Law Prof. (and former University first lady) Leigh Bienen in helping to change his mind about the issue. On a deeper level, the law school’s Center on Wrongful Convictions has played a pivotal role in advocating against the death penalty. Perhaps most importantly, the center’s work in conjunction with the Medill Innocence Project has garnered national recognition for the issue by repeatedly showing the flaws of the criminal justice system through proving wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project has been widely credited as one catalyst for the state’s liberal policy regarding the death penalty.
Indeed, The Daily comes to its current position on this issue after more than a decade of watching NU’s most high-profile class free 11 innocent men from prison, including five from death row.
It is this simple reasoning on which we rest our case: Advocates on both sides can argue about the morality of the death penalty until they are blue in the face, but they cannot disagree on the issue of wrongful convictions. The execution of an innocent man represents the ultimate failure of any government.
It’s an ugly truth: wrongful convictions happen. The only question is how often. Estimates range from less than one percent of prisoners in Illinois to as high as 10 percent. In the 15 years before Gov. George Ryan’s blanket clemency order on death row inmates in 2003, 298 men and women were sentenced to death in Illinois, and 18 of those have since been exonerated. That represents an exoneration rate of 6 percent, the highest of the 38 states who still use the death penalty.
As the Medill Innocence Project has demonstrated time and time again, DNA and non-DNA evidence can surface to exonerate the convicted. Under life imprisonment, an innocent inmate can be taken out of prison. But we cannot bring an executed inmate back to life. Even the slightest chance that an innocent man can be put to death outweighs any benefit a death penalty could bring.
And those benefits are tenuous at best.
The most oft-cited benefit is that the death penalty serves as a deterrent for future crimes. This is a flawed argument for several reasons. The types of crimes that warrant the death penalty – rape, murder – are crimes of passion, and perpetrators of these crimes are rarely deterred by the thought of potentially being put on death row. Second, the death penalty is used in only a small number of crimes, and it is so unevenly and arbitrarily applied that it would likely not deter a heinous crime. Moreover, the death penalty is certainly not a deterrent in Illinois, which has operated under a moratorium on its use since 2000.
Some argue the death penalty brings needed relief to suffering victims and their families. We acknowledge that this may be true. Perhaps it’s also true that some people have committed crimes so horrific that they don’t deserve to live, like those in Connecticut in 2007, when two men raped, sexually assaulted and burned with gasoline members of the Petit family.
But we feel troubled, at best, that a society that prides itself on its civility would resort to a revenge-fueled mantra: death for death.
Meanwhile, there are additional benefits to permanently abolishing the death penalty.
Chief among them is a financial concern; the death penalty is expensive. In Illinois, executing an inmate costs twice as much as imprisoning them for life, based on estimates from the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Death row inmates often have access to free legal counsel, and the high number of appeals involved in death row cases can cost millions upon millions of dollars. Illinois now faces a large budget deficit, to which lawmakers responded by passing a 67 percent income tax hike last week. Abolishing the death penalty could be one way, among many, for the state to cut costs during this unprecedented fiscal emergency.
Perhaps it is appropriate that Quinn was given this important decision during the very week of the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. King himself was a passionate opponent of the death penalty. After his tragic assassination, his wife famously said, “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.”
The Daily recognizes that this is not the opinion of all who have seen their loved ones murdered, nor do we necessarily expect it to be. But we believe Quinn would choose wisely to heed the words of Coretta Scott King and the efforts of the Medill Innocent Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions.
The death penalty is an expensive, ineffective and immoral system, and it’s time it is permanently banned in our state.
