Rauner wants to undo Illinois’ death penalty reforms to get himself votes

I think former Gov. George Ryan deserves praise for the way he effectively ended capital punishment in Illinois, and former Gov. Pat Quinn ought to get credit for formally ending the practice of committing homicide in the name of “Justice” in our state.

Is Gov. Bruce Rauner really trying to undo ...

But I also realize there are some people living in this state who have ideological hang-ups that cause them to despise the notion that we in Illinois no longer puts people to death as a form of criminal punishment. Which is what I suspect is Gov. Bruce Rauner’s motivation for actions Monday meant to try to bring back capital punishment.

RAUNER WANTS THE people who ridiculously think he’s some form of social liberal to actually be inclined to vote for him come Nov. 6 – instead of desperately searching for a third-party gubernatorial candidate.

Because the way things are shaping up, the number of people who’d be willing to vote for Bruce will wind up being smaller than the Democrats who will eagerly vote for J.B. Pritzker for governor out of the idea of snatching back the post from the GOP.

Rauner stirred up the death penalty pot on Monday when he used his amendatory veto powers to alter a bill that was intended to impose various restrictions on firearms ownership.

That measure included an extension of a three-day waiting period for someone to actually obtain the firearm they want to buy, a ban on bump stocks and trigger cranks that turn regular firearms into higher-powered weapons of destruction and allowing judges to issue restraining orders to disarm people considered dangerous.

... the actions of Pat Quinn ... 

ALL ARE IDEAS the conservative ideologues hate because they see them as restrictions on what they want to believe is a Constitutionally-issued right of all people to own firearms.

So Rauner will score bonus points with the ideologues if his politicking manages to make a mess of this proposal that was approved this spring by the General Assembly.

And if, by chance, Rauner were to actually get the state Legislature to accept his addition of a capital crimes statute for people convicted of murder against multiple people and against police officers, he’d be giving the ideologues something they fantasize about.

Which is why we’re now going to go through a partisan political mess in the near future over what will become of this measure that was one of several the Democratic-run Legislature approved as a reaction to incidents of mass violence occurring across the nation.

... and George Ryan, or just trying  ...

IT MAY BE the big ideological difference between the political partisans – the more liberal-minded want measures they think will reduce the violence, while the conservative-leaning amongst us want to have tougher penalties for those who commit such acts.

Like I already wrote, I supported the past measures that eliminated capital punishment in Illinois. Largely because it became blatantly obvious that our system was more than capable of issuing ultimate (and irrevocable) penalty to people who didn’t commit the crime.

Rauner claims he’s going to get around this by requiring cases where the death penalty is sought to be held to the standard of “guilty beyond all doubt,” rather than the “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” legal standard that is required for a criminal conviction for any other offense.

Which sounds cute. It sounds nice. But it is a ridiculous notion to think we can achieve. For as long as we have human involvement in the criminal justice system, there are going to be screw-ups.

THERE’S JUST NO way we can ever have an absolute truth within our system. Anybody who says we can is either lying to us or is seriously delusional. Neither of which ought to be trusted.

... to Dump Madigan! come November?

So if I view this effort as a political maneuver by Rauner, it makes sense.

He’s tossing out some rhetoric meant to appease the ideologues inclined to think he’s wrong on abortion, immigration and equality for gay people, hoping that it might get them to vote for him.

And if in the process, he manages to derail a firearms-related bill that they despise they’ll love him – even if, in the end, they wind up sitting on their hands and doing nothing come Election Day.

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Tribute to nurses instead of Speck would be a welcome relief for neighborhood

It was with a personal touch that I read the Chicago Tribune account of Dr. John Schmale, who discovered a stash of slides in a water-flooded basement bringing back to life his little sister Nina Jo.

Who was one of the eight women who died nearly 50 years ago when she was in an apartment being shared by several student nurses at the old South Chicago Community Hospital nursing school that happened to be stumbled upon by Richard Speck.

HE WAS A commercial seaman whose ship happened to dock in the ports along the Calumet River, and he got drunk in a tavern that now is a vacant lot, when he got the urge to find those young girls.

One got raped, while eight were stabbed and slashed to death. One nurse had the temerity to hide under a bed and would up surviving the attack.

Schmale talks of wanting to create a memorial to the July 1966 incident that would remember the young women and let us know of the potential human beings they never got the chance to become.

Which would be a relief, since much of what gets remembered of that long-ago mass murder was of Speck – both in his gruesomeness that night, the way that death penalty law got altered in the 1970s so that his own death sentence was never carried out, and that crude prison-made (it appears) porno film featuring Speck himself.

NOT THE MOST pleasant of accounts to recall. Something I wouldn’t even bother to acknowledge if not for Schmale.

For I am a South Chicago neighborhood native, although I haven’t lived in the neighborhood proper in a long time.

But my usual route to get there includes a trip on the Bishop Ford Freeway to 103^rd Street, where I then venture east. Which takes me through the neighborhood where the crime took place.

I can actually venture up toward 100^th Street to check out the townhouse where the slayings took place, if I’m in a particularly ghoulish mood. I most definitely venture past Trumbull Park.

WHICH IS ONE of those assets that theoretically could help make the South Deering neighborhood a nice community to live in. Although I recall the news reports that came out at the time of the crime that acknowledged the initial Chicago Police Department reaction was to roust all the would-be delinquents who were hanging around the park at the time to see if any of them were involved in the brutal slayings.

It’s something of a daily reminder of what once happened there. Although I’m sure that with the passing of a half-century, there probably are way too many people too young to know. And some who probably could care less what happened before they arrived in the neighborhood.

They may figure there have been countless crimes committed in the area since then, so many that getting worked up over this one is somehow a waste of time.

Which may be why shifting the focus off Speck (he wound up dying in prison nearly a quarter of a century ago) would be a plus. The real crime of murder isn’t so much the violent act itself, but that it causes a loss of life that could have contributed something to society.

PARTICULARLY IN THIS case, where potential medical personnel were involved.

I also recall a moment in high school where I had to give a speech – mine was about the death penalty, and I used a lame argument for capital punishment that Speck didn’t deserve to live after what he did.

Although now that I think of it all these years later, I’m inclined to think the Speck punishment (spending the last 25 years of his life locked up) was most appropriate – particularly because of that porno-film incident – which I recall seeing along with several General Assembly members in Springfield who used it as a chance to investigate prison security.

Seeing Speck showing off his pair of blue panties and babbling about how his incarcerated life turned out made him such a pathetic joke – one that truly isn’t worth paying too much more attention to.

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Some people just determined to live in the past (and make us live there too)

I can’t say I was surprised to learn recently that a state legislator is talking about wanting to bring back the death penalty to Illinois.

HAINE: Wants to bring back death penalty

There hadn’t been an execution in this state since 1999, and then-Gov. George Ryan cleared out the state’s ‘death row’ just before leaving office early in 2003. Then, the Legislature and then-Gov. Pat Quinn did away with the capital crimes statute in 2011.

WHICH MEANS THE worst of the criminal element in Illinois get locked away in prison for life, without the option of parole. To anyone with sense, that sounds pretty bad. You can’t get more severe than letting someone know they’re going to grow old and die in a place that no one with sense ever wants to be in.

But there are always those people like Bill Haine, a state senator from Alton (near St. Louis), who last week said he plans to sponsor a bill to bring back the death penalty.

He’s falling into a line of logic that really doesn’t make much sense – some crimes are so high-profile that people are entitled to know someone will die for them.

He brought up the recent cop killing in suburban Fox Lake (which has been getting significant news coverage largely because it’s coming at a time when there’s little else happening – a “slow news day,” so to speak) as such evidence. He probably will get someone with a vengeance streak strong enough to want an execution.

NOT THAT IT would really mean anything. Chances are that anyone with a personal stake would be so offended that even an execution wouldn’t appease them.

My own death penalty stance actually got solidified on that spring night in 1994 when John Gacy was put to death at the Stateville Correctional Center. I was a reporter-type person that night, and got to see the many people who felt compelled to see blood. I was particularly peeved at the batch who felt the need to taunt a pair of nuns and a priest who were among the few who felt any compassion for human life in general.

So excuse me for not being sympathetic to those people who can’t handle the thought that the idea of homicide in the name of ‘justice’ just doesn’t make any sense.

It will be a dark day at Statehouse if death penalty actually returns

Then again, there will always be those people who want to think that the trends of society moving forward is a mistake.

JUST LIKE THOSE individuals like that clerk in rural Kentucky who did a few days in a county jail, and thinks she’s now a victim who suffered for Christianity – all because she can’t handle the idea that marriage for gay couples has the support of the law.

The people who have that hang-up are likely to focus their efforts on trying to figure out how to thwart the concept as much as possible. In their minds, they’re probably looking to all the anti-abortion activists who throughout the years have been able to push for so many restrictions that there are large swaths of the United States where it becomes next to impossible to actually obtain an abortion.

They’d probably like to have only certain places where gay couples could get married – then they’ll try to restrict the ability of their local residents to even think of going to those places.

All issues where a 19^th Century mentality is what is being sought by the ideologues of our society.

WHICH IS WHERE the death penalty becomes yet another issue where some people want to live in the past.

It’s another issue where the trend is to ditch the idea (although Wisconsin has not had a capital crimes statute for most of its existence, and it is surviving very well). Some 20 states have done away with the death penalty, some since Illinois.

Does anyone think Dahmer got off lightly?

Wisconsin, of course, was the state that gave us Jeffrey Dahmer some two decades ago. He of the cannibalistic streak whose own lengthy prison sentence came to an abrupt end when another inmate decided to kill him for who knows why!

Somehow, I don’t think that a similar fate for whoever winds up being arrested for the slaying of Fox Lake police Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz would be out-of-line.

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Must we relive death penalty fight?

Illinois does not have a valid capital crimes statute any longer – our state officials abolished the death penalty a few years go after years of evidence indicating how flawed it was.

PORTER: Did he really do it, after all?

But it seems we still have some people determined to fight for the cause of putting people to death so as to satisfy someone else’s need for “vengeance!”

OR AT LEAST that’s the reaction I got in my gut when I read reports earlier this week that said former Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine prosecuted an innocent man for a crime for which the state had previously sentenced the real “killer” to death.

The only problem is that this particular case is that of Anthony Porter – who for a short stretch was an international figure in the death penalty debate.

Porter served 16 years of his life in the Illinois Department of Corrections under a death sentence – and at one point was just a few hours away from actually facing execution by lethal injection.

But that execution was put on hold, and Porter was eventually released from prison due to clemency from now-former Gov. George Ryan. In fact, it was Porter’s case that supposedly motivated Ryan to think that Illinois’ death penalty system was too flawed to be kept on the books.

IT CAUSED RYAN to impose the moratorium on executions that remained through the time when the General Assembly finally voted to abolish the death penalty AND Gov. Pat Quinn signed that change into Illinois law!

Porter’s evidence of his innocence included the work of students of a now-former Northwestern University professor, who in working with private investigators got another man to say he committed the crime for which Porter was convicted.

And they got him to say it on videotape, which is what made the story so intriguing (and easy) for television to pick up on. Television stations everywhere picked up the story. That caused Devine to decide not to resist fighting to keep Porter in prison, and to go along with a prosecution of the man on videotape.

He ultimately pleaded guilty and received a lengthy prison sentence, for which he still is incarcerated – although the Chicago Sun-Times reported he could be up for parole in 2017.

BUT THE SUN-TIMES’ report focused on the fact that now-retired prosecutor Thomas Epach, Jr., is saying he wonders if the man now in prison is truly innocent, and if Porter really did do the crime for which he has been exonerated for the past 15 years.

I’ll be the first to admit that back when David Protess’ students showed their video confession publicly (I was a reporter-type back then, and I remember the death penalty fiasco in Illinois all too well), my gut reaction was to wonder, “How do we know he’s telling the truth?”

But nobody else seemed to be concerned. That question seemed to get swept aside in the storm over whether Illinois was too sloppy in prosecuting capital offenses that we couldn’t be assured the convictions were legitimate.

Although now, Epach is trying to argue the same point, saying in an affidavit, “It is my opinion that it was highly unusual, if not unprecedented, to make a decision to release an individual convicted of murder, based upon the broadcast of a video, the reliability and authenticity of which had not been thoroughly investigated and established.”

WHICH MIGHT BE a legitimate point if he had forcefully brought it up back then.

Now? It comes across as someone’s last-ditch effort to find a wrench to throw into the gears.

Does anyone think we can somehow undo the abolishment of the death penalty? Particularly since after all these years, it has come down to the ultimate “he said/she said” argument that a prosecutor usually would denounce if it were made against them!

Are we supposed to put an asterisk (*) next to Porter’s name on the list of Illinois Death Row inmates of the 1990s who wound up having to be released from prison alive, rather than in a cheap casket?

THIS IS ONE fight that is best left in the past. Otherwise, we might as well show down the whole criminal justice system – if we come to the conclusion that none of its verdicts can be trusted; regardless of which way they come down.

Let the “law and order” types mull over that concept, for awhile.

  -30-

EDITOR'S NOTE: Remember the "Ford Heights Four," another set of Death Row inmates who wound up being exonerated for the crimes they were accused of? The Chicago Tribune tells us their lives aren't exactly free of stigma, despite the freedom they have now had for nearly two decades.

When it comes to death penalty (or lack thereof), some just want to complain

I don’t doubt there are some people who will be permanently peeved that Gov. Pat Quinn signed the bill that did away with the capital crimes statute in Illinois. Some probably will hold a grudge against Quinn, the man, for the remainder of their lives.

QUINN: 47 percent of Dems disapprove?



The question, however, is just how much attention should Quinn (whom a new poll says has only a 30.6 percent approval rating) pay to these people?

I’D ARGUE THAT the reason prosecutors are so intense for having a death penalty in this state is because they allowed these individuals to intimidate them. Because these death penalty proponents, particularly the ones who remain bitter over the loss of a loved one due to a violent crime, can be a forceful presence.

The issue, as I see it, is that a governor has to balance out all the sides on this particular issue before taking a stance. As much as I wonder why it took Quinn nearly two full months to do so before he finally signed the death penalty abolition bill into law, I do believe he listened to all the sides and tried to figure out the issue for himself.

Apparently, he didn’t listen to every single individual, since we have been getting reports in various publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, from a Rolling Meadows woman whose daughter is dead, and the man convicted of murder for that crime had his death sentence converted to a prison term of life-without-parole.

The woman is going around saying she is so upset with the governor that she will actively campaign against him in 2014, and would be willing to make a heart-felt, soppy campaign ad for whomever tries to challenge the Mighty Quinn in the next gubernatorial election,.

SHE IS UPSET that her attempts to talk to the governor to convince him (if not intimidate him) to keep the death penalty got her nothing more than a chance to talk to a gubernatorial aide. Perhaps she really believes she could have persuaded Quinn to act differently.

I doubt it, since Quinn did include advocates for the families of victims of capital crimes among the types of people he talked to. The fact that he didn’t talk to this specific woman doesn’t move me in any way.

Now I know some prosecutorial types who argue that death penalty opponents do not adequately take into account these family members and their sentiments when we talk about the death penalty being improper.

As though the fact that the death penalty system has flaws that likely are never to be overcome because human beings are fallible by nature doesn’t matter. My guess is that some people would rather have the occasional wrongly-convicted person put to death, than have to do anything that might offend these particular people.

MY OWN FEELINGS about this particular aspect of the death penalty debate actually got cemented following state government hearings a decade ago in Chicago that then-Gov. George Ryan hoped would expose the flaws in the system and how close Illinois came during the 1990s to putting innocent people to death, in the name of Justice!

Instead, activist groups that back the death penalty managed to load up the agenda with testimony from so many family members who told their stories to such an intense degree that the mood of intimidation came down upon those hearings.

Any attempt to build support for a reformed death penalty procedure got crushed amidst gruesome stories. The General Assembly wound up passing nothing in the way of reform. I remain convinced that had the state Legislature given Ryan some bill to sign that he could have claimed was a procedural reform, he never would have taken the drastic action of his final days in office that brought a halt to actual executions and also commuted the death sentences of the 160-plus condemned inmates in Illinois.

If there is anyone I have sympathy for these days, it is not these family members. It is the people in the State Appellate Defender’s office, some 37 of whom are now learning that their jobs are being cut.

THE HERALD & Review newspaper of Decatur reported that the move is meant to save state government about $4.7 million. I have no problem with budget cuts, and realize that people are going to lose their jobs – regardless of how unpleasant that experience is.

But these particular individuals are losing their jobs because they were the attorneys provided to indigent “death row” inmates to help them with their legal appeals – which were mandatory. They had to be heard by the courts.

Which is why it is cheaper for the state to do without the death penalty. An inmate in the general population whose appeals can be dismissed by the courts as frivolous is much cheaper than a condemned inmate kept under much more intense security whose appeals must be heard through three rounds that must end at the Supreme Court of the United States.

So while I realize it is a “good” thing that the state budget can be cut, I still sympathize with those attorneys who now need to find new work. Of course, I suspect the family members probably think those attorneys ARE the problem for taking on these particular cases. But that is an issue to be debated on another day.

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Executing the Death Penalty? Or will prosecutors seek legal loopholes to keep?

Too many prosecutors, particularly when it comes to violent crime, view themselves as being similar to Alex Vraciu, Jr., a Navy fighter pilot who -- with 19 "enemy" aircraft shot down -- was the fourth-ranking "ace" of World War II. Image provided by DePauw University.

To me, there was always something a bit perverse about the criminal prosecutors who insist they need to have a death penalty in order to do their jobs.

During my two-plus decades as a reporter-type person, I have known prosecutors who can give you the exact number of convictions they have gained in their career, and can even tell you the number of people who are on “death row” because of their work.

IT ALMOST SEEMS to me like a World War I (or II)-era fighter pilot, making marks on the side of his aircraft every time he shoots down an “enemy” fighter. Which makes me think their real opposition to Gov. Pat Quinn’s decision Wednesday to do away with the state’s capital crimes statute is because it challenges the very way they view their jobs.

I’d hate to think that the opposition being expressed across the state by state’s attorneys is because some of them are going to have to find a new way of evaluating their professional skill in putting people away from the rest of society, and because those prosecutors who have significant totals of death row inmates in their record now have a statistic that makes them appear to be incredibly obsolete – if not downright morbid.

                                       

If it reads to you like I’m being overly harsh with prosecutors, it is because my gut reaction in the hours following Quinn’s announcement that the death penalty in Illinois will be no more as of July 1 is one of disgust.

Not because of what Quinn did. I think he did exactly the right thing. Both in abolishing the capital crimes statute, and in realizing that Illinois would look incredibly stupid if 15 people continued to remain on “death row” in this state. So he officially commuted all of those sentences to life prison terms, without an option for parole.

BERLIN: Just talk, or going too far?

WHAT BOTHERS ME is the prosecutorial reaction, particularly the one coming from suburban DuPage County, where State’s Attorney Robert Berlin went overboard with his rhetoric in telling reporter-types, “Today is a victory for murderers across Illinois. Violent offenders can now murder police officers, kill victims during forcible felonies, kill multiple victims and kill witnesses without fear of receiving the death penalty.” I've heard hysterical defense attorneys who didn't get that carried away.

What bothers me more than his talk are his potential actions. There is a case in the DuPage County court system coming up that prosecutors were hoping to seek a death sentence for Gary Schuning. Berlin says prosecutors will decide what to do in the next couple of weeks.

Which sounds to me way too much like he’d like to find a legal loophole by which he could still get in one final “kill” before the death penalty disappears in Illinois.

Prosecutors knowing that the “spirit of the law” clearly says one thing, but they find a way to achieve the exact opposite. That kind of thinking is why so many people in our society don’t trust attorneys.

COULD WE WIND up with a system where Quinn has to keep alert in coming years for cases of condemned inmates whom he has to commute to “life without parole,” all because some prosecutor wanted to try to bolster his record with “one more kill?”

I can’t help but think that doing anything but accepting that Illinois is now among the third of the nation that does not have a capital crimes statute is repulsive – perhaps almost as much as the acts for which Schuning himself currently faces charges of murder (his mother and a sex escort, for those who want the titillating details).

I certainly find the fact that some prosecutors may try to slip in a final death penalty conviction before the “letter of the law” makes their behavior illegal to be more repulsive than the fact that another inmate from DuPage County, Brian Dugan, will now never have to face the threat of dying due to a lethal injection of three fatal chemicals.

If anything, the obsession some people have had with the death penalty with regards to Dugan and the previous inmates who once faced charges for the 1983 death of 7-year-old Jeanine Nicarico is some of the best evidence for why we’re better off not having it as an option.

SOME CASES JUST get people too worked up into wanting to create images of a dead inmate corpse. In those cases, the gut feeling gets the best of our society’s common sense, and caused many of the legal errors and flaws that are the reasons why Quinn felt the need to sign the bill into law.

Doing away with the death penalty keeps us from falling victim to our base, gutteral instincts. In some ways, it encourages those instincts to prevail. Which makes me wonder if we as a society are more safe in a state without capital punishment than one with it.

As for those people who want to think we’re now in the minority in doing away with capital punishment, I can’t help but note that the states without a death penalty include Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa – our Midwestern neighbors. Perhaps doing away with a capital crimes statute is merely evidence of Midwest common sense that we like to think we possess.

Perhaps we should be wondering why Missouri, Ohio and Indiana haven’t joined the rest of us – although in the case of the Hoosier State, those people are still quarrelling over smoking bans in public places. We should expect they will bring up the rear on this issue.

  -30-

Did sex class delay death penalty action?

It amazes me the way some people are determined to take irrelevant, and often trivial, actions and turn them into a controversy that taints everything by association.

The most recent example of this is the fact that Gov. Pat Quinn may have gone so far as to delay taking action on the bill that would do away with the death penalty in Illinois, cutting off any act last week and making us wait even longer for his decision (which could wind up being the most significant act he takes as governor).

THE SPECULATION HAS always been that Quinn is leaning toward signing the bill into law, and would somehow use Northwestern University and its Center on Wrongful Convictions as the setting for such a bill-signing ceremony.

That center is the organization that did much work toward promoting the reality that Illinois’ capital crimes statute is flawed in its execution – perhaps meaning that the statute itself is what needs to be executed.

The university also was the scene when Gov. George Ryan back in January 2003 went so far as to impose the moratorium that still prevents executions from taking place, while also commuting all the existing death sentences to prison terms of life without parole.

But in the past week, Northwestern University has received its share of ugly publicity. Not that the Center on Wrongful Convictions was involved in this. But a psychology professor on campus used a live sex act demonstration as part of an impromptu part of his class lecture on deviant sexual practices.

THE IMAGE BEING created by the critics, particularly those of the conservative ideological persuasion, is of innocent, young students being subjected to real-live porn. Seedy sex shows at the wish-it-was-an-Ivy League campus on the North Shore.

Of course, the fact that this course was entitled “Human Sexuality” and was an advanced level course means that none of the 100 or so students whose tuition payments entitle them to sit in on the course should have been shocked or offended by the material. If they were, my only reaction is to ask them, “What did you think you’d be studying?”

QUINN: What would he know about sex?

But after listening to speculation that the bill-signing ceremonies and rituals by which Quinn tries to make the death penalty bill a significant moment in Illinois history were going to take place on the Evanston-based college campus, we made it through last week without any action taking place.

Did Pat Quinn refuse to sign the bill into law at Northwestern because he was afraid he would get ambushed with questions about sexual practices? Would our state’s governor have a clue how to answer those questions? Are there people who are shallow enough to really think that such questions would, in any way, be relevant to an act related to the death penalty?

I’D LIKE TO think that people have enough intelligence to realize that one issue has nothing to do with the other, and that the people who do insist on trying to bring sex up in conjunction with capital punishment would be seen as the ideological nit-wits that they are. Or are we going to start asking Northwestern Wildcats athletics coaches sex questions every time a ballplayer blows a play?

Then again, maybe I’m giving the people credit for more intelligence than they deserve. For I have seen many political campaigns throughout the years end with certain individuals tainted with trash rhetoric that borders on the ridiculous.

And before you try to claim I’m saying that candidates of a more liberal ideological persuasion are being picked on, what I’m saying is that I don’t think state Sen. Bill Brady, R-Bloomington, is anywhere near as much of an ideologue as his opposition claimed. It’s just that his downstate orientation put him out of touch with the way that the two-thirds of Illinoisans who live in the Chicago area perceive things.

Which may well include the death penalty, since Brady was the candidate in last year’s gubernatorial election cycle who campaigned on the idea that he would do away with the execution moratorium and restore the process of actually executing people – something that hasn’t happened in 12 years.

SO NOW, WE have to figure out what Quinn WILL do with the state’s capital crimes statute.

Is he going to search for an alternate site to stage an event (as though joining our Midwestern brethren in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin in doing away with death as a criminal punishment wouldn’t be major without staging)?

Or are we literally going to get just a brief statement released in the name of the governor informing us that the bill in question has been signed into law? Or vetoed? Who’s to say?

Either way, we’re running out of time. State law puts a time limit on when the governor must act – and that deadline is coming up next week Friday.

SO SOME TIME soon, Quinn is either going to seriously please or grossly offend the bulk of the people who picked him over Brady last year to be Illinois governor. As for those who didn’t vote for him, they’re going to remain miffed EVEN if he does what they’d like on this issue.

Then after the debate is complete on that issue, we can shift gears and argue about whether a man using a machine-powered phallic device to penetrate a nude woman is an appropriate part of a classroom discussion.

  -30-

Abolish executions, commute sentences, upset the status quo – it’s the only way

QUINN: One more month to make up his mind

Illinois law gives Gov. Pat Quinn a little over one more month to make up his mind what to do with the bill approved by the old state Legislature that abolishes capital punishment. Yet the sooner Quinn realizes that there’s no way he can get out of this situation without upsetting somebody, the better off he (and we) will be.

There’s no compromise when it comes to the death penalty. Some people in Illinois are going to be completely outraged, no matter what Quinn chooses to do. Any attempt by him to create a chain reaction of legislation to appease people will be perceived as nothing but phony gestures, for which he will be lambasted even more than had he just acted on the bill and left it at that.

FOR THOSE WHOSE attention span is so short that you’ve already forgotten who won the Super Bowl, what is at stake is the capital crimes statute in Illinois.

The General Assembly, on its final day of business last month before transitioning into the new Legislature that was elected in November, did what some people considered to be the unthinkable – they did away with the idea of killing people as punishment for a crime.

No longer will the total number of homicides in Alexander County be inflated by the number of executions conducted at the state prison near Tamms.

Unless Quinn uses his “veto” power to kill the bill. Which he can do because he’s in the rare set of circumstances where he gets the last word. The old Legislature that approved abolition no longer exists, so they’re not capable of convening to try to override a Quinn veto.

THE REALITY OF the situation is that Quinn ideologically is inclined to support the people who would want to do away with the death penalty. He may have said during the campaign last year that he would let the death penalty remain, but he also was the candidate who wanted to keep the moratorium in place that prevents anyone on “death row” from actually being put to death.

Which means the bottom line for Quinn is that he didn’t want to be presiding over executions on his watch. Illinoisans who wanted the state to resume executions (there haven’t been any since 1999 when Andrew Kokoraleis was put to death by lethal injection) largely voted for Quinn’s Republican challenger, William Brady, who pledged during the campaign to lift the moratorium.

It is because of those circumstances that I think the people who are saying Quinn is obligated to veto the abolition bill because of his campaign promise are missing the point. I’m convinced Quinn only threw in the additional rhetoric because he never would have dreamed the state Legislature could get its act together and pass a bill to do away with the death penalty.

But they did.

AND NOW, THE matter lies within Quinn’s hands, since he’s also going to have to decide what to do with the 15 people now on death row, and the one or two individuals whose trials currently are pending who may wind up being sentenced to death before Quinn gets off his duff and acts.

If he vetoes and does not commute those sentences (realistically, the two acts must be done together, which may be the only thing death penalty proponent Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons and I agree on), Quinn will upset the people who for the past two decades have worked to show how flawed our state’s capital crimes setup truly is.

Or he’s going to infuriate the conservative ideologues who drool over the image of a state that kills people for punishment. I’m talking about those goofs who had nothing better to do with their lives back in the 1990s than to show up outside of the Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet to rally for the deaths of the condemned – while also taunting those who showed up to protest the act.

Yes, I went from apathetic death penalty opponent to stringent one the night in 1994 when John Gacy was put to death, and I got to see people wearing t-shirts bearing slogans such as “No Tears For The Clown” heckle a nun who was trying to pray for Gacy’s soul.

I’M SURE THOSE people will be ticked off at Quinn if he signs the bill into law. But then again, perhaps their offense is evidence that we’re doing something right. Besides, I doubt that Quinn could do anything to truly please this type of person – who probably voted against him for a myriad of reasons, not just capital punishment.

There also are those people who are talking up some sort of legislative compromise, such as Quinn signs the abolition bill into law, then lobbies the General Assembly to create a new capital crimes statute – one that supposedly has safeguards and is so restrictive that its potential for abuse is minimal.

Doesn’t that sound sweet? It’s just too bad that it’s pure fantasy. You might as well tell me the Chicago Cubs are going to win the World Series this season.

If our Legislature were capable of coming up with that kind of statute, they would have amended the old death penalty laws years ago. Heck, the reason Ryan ultimately went with moratorium, then commutation of sentences for all 160-plus death row inmates in Illinois, was because the General Assembly didn’t want to touch the issue.

EVEN IN YEARS since, they have been reluctant to do a thing with the issue. It is why action as drastic as abolition is called for.

For what it’s worth, I can think of one other reason for Illinois to join the ranks of 15 other states that don’t have a death penalty. There are those who will claim that we ought to be with the majority 35 states, but I can’t help but notice that the 15 include our Midwestern neighbors of Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

I have always thought the Midwestern U.S. had a little more sense on many issues. Perhaps it’s time we got with the program that our neighbor states realized many years ago.

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Is Assange a Nobel distraction for Ryan?

RYAN: Will he win this year?

I can think of one “advantage” to having WikiLinks founder Julian Assange being among those under consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize – it would mean that George Ryan would be far from the most controversial person whose name has been put forth for the prize meant to honor people whose work helps contribute toward “fraternity among nations.”

Assange got nominated for the prize, whose winner will be announced in October, by a youthful member of the parliament in Norway on the grounds that his use of his Internet presence to disclose assorted government documents and cables (some classified, but most just embarrassing to the government officials named) benefits mankind by making information public.

YET THE FACT that some of the information made public was classified, and the fact that the humiliation experienced by some government officials may very well drive the “fraternity among nations” further apart may well mean that Assange is the last person who ought to get the Peace Prize.

Give it to the person who comes in and fixes the mess caused by Assange – who these days is preoccupied with trying to avoid going to prison for allegations of sex crimes committed in Sweden.

By comparison, the best we have locally is the repeat performance of former Gov. George Ryan being nominated for the prize for the actions he took as governor that have brought our state’s death penalty procedures to a grinding halt for more than a decade.

Personally, I don’t think Ryan has much of a chance of getting the Nobel Prize this year. I believe that if it were ever going to happen, it would have happened quickly when his noble activities worthy of a Nobel were still fresh (and not nearly a decade old).

BUT THE UNIVERSITY of Illinois at Urbana law school professor who in recent years has repeatedly touted Ryan for the Nobel said this week that he once again made his nomination – which was due to the Nobel Foundation by Tuesday.

The reality of our society today is that the death penalty as punishment for violent crimes is on the decline. The few states that persist in using it regularly are more interested in making some statement about their own view of life, rather than trying to impose penalties that would actually discourage others from committing crimes.

The fact that Ryan, while he was governor of Illinois, imposed the moratorium on executions that remains in place to this day and also cleaned out the state’s death rows of the just over 160 condemned inmates at the time are being portrayed as bold acts that helped trigger the movement away from capital punishment during the first decade of the 21^st Century.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported earlier this week, Francis Boyle of the law school wrote in an e-mail, “thanks to Governor George Ryan, there have been no…executions by the state of Illinois for over a decade.”

THAT PART IS true. Illinois hasn’t had an execution since 1999 when Andrew Kokoraleis was put to death at the prison near Tamms in far Southern Illinois. That was the only execution Ryan presided over. It was soon after that Ryan began taking an interest in issues related to the state’s capital crimes statutes.

Personally, I respected Ryan’s actions, and wish/hope/demand/beg that current Gov. Pat Quinn would take the next logical step in that direction by signing into law the measure approved by the old General Assembly to abolish the state’s capital crimes statutes. Because the Illinois status quo that Ryan created (a death penalty that we don't use) was only meant to be temporary.

Which is why I’m not quite sure that Ryan's actions qualify for a Nobel – unless one wants to believe the line of thought that giving the ex-gov the prize would be a jolt of support for the movement around the world to abolish the death penalty, which Ryan himself did NOT do.

The prizes awarded in recent years to Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were seen as symbolic gestures of support for the direction those two men wanted to take our society (and a rebuke to the conservative ideologues who have their own ideas about where our country should be headed).

ACCORDING TO REPORTS, Boyle included in his nomination of Ryan this year his belief that the reason the former governor is in prison is because prosecutors wanted to punish him for taking actions against the death penalty.

That might be an over-simplification, although I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that many of the people who are most vehemently opposed to Ryan and who take the greatest pleasure in his current incarceration at the work camp near the maximum-security correctional center near Terre Haute, Ind., are the ones who remain offended that he took such actions.

All the other issues involved in Ryan’s case are of lesser importance to those people – similar to how Al Capone may have offended us with his racketeering and violent gangland activity, but prosecutors used federal tax law violations to justify putting him in prison.

Yet compared to Assange, he’s just boring – if not downright conventional.

THE IDEA OF considering Assange for the Peace Prize gives us a story with elements of national security, espionage and sex (blonde women who claim they were taken advantage of). Ryan comes off as a stuffy, grouchy ol’ grampa by comparison.

Perhaps it will take a few more wild-eyed nominees like an Assange to make Ryan appear to be the favorite.

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Just sign the bill already, Governor

Gov. Pat Quinn is confronted with a chance in coming weeks to gain some national attention for himself, although I strongly suspect this was an opportunity he gladly would have passed on.

QUINN: A tougher choice than 66 percent



For the Illinois General Assembly in recent weeks worked a bill through the process that abolishes the concept of capital punishment for people convicted of certain violent crimes.

THERE HASN’T BEEN an execution in Illinois in nearly 12 years, and the few inmates currently on the state’s death rows aren’t in any danger of being put to death by lethal injection because of the moratorium on executions enacted by then-Gov. George Ryan and maintained by every single one of his predecessors.

That even includes Quinn, who during last year’s campaign cycle pledged to keep the moratorium in place, compared to his opponent, William Brady, who wanted to do away with it and go back to scheduling execution dates so that death could proceed for these inmates.

Of course, Quinn also said back then that he could support having a capital crimes statute in Illinois law, “when applied carefully and fairly.”

So what’s the deal, guv?

ARE YOU FOR, or against, capital punishment? It’s all in your hands now, since the Legislature did their work to pass a bill that abolishes the death penalty laws that Illinois enacted in 1977 (the laws that existed prior to then were struck down in 1972 by the Supreme Court of the United States, and Illinois actually didn’t have a death penalty in those five years in between, which is why Richard Speck rotted and died in prison and Henry Brisbon, the "I-57 Killer," continues to rot).

For the record, gubernatorial aides are telling reporter-types as little as possible, saying merely that Quinn will review the bill. The governor himself on Wednesday would only say he would, "follow my conscience" when he gets the bill.

My guess is that Quinn never would have imagined it possible that the General Assembly could get its act together and get enough votes to pass this measure – which by its very nature ticks off prosecutorial types and certain sick-minded law-and-order types who like the idea of being able to “play God” and take away life in certain circumstances.

If you didn’t realize it already, you would have figured it out by that last statement. I don’t favor the death penalty, in part because it is too flawed and we have too many documented cases of people who faced execution, only to have it learned that their criminal convictions were seriously flawed.

SO QUINN, IF he were to show some nerve and sign the bill into law, would be granting my desire on this particular issue.

But there is something about Quinn’s lack of nerve on this issue that bothers me. It is the sense I detect that Quinn himself seriously wishes this issue would go away without him having to make a decision – because he doesn’t want to offend those people who have been ranting and raging and will continue to do so unless Illinois remains like Indiana, instead of becoming like Wisconsin and places like California and New York (the states that have the other two major cities of our nation).

I’m wondering if Quinn really believes that he’s better off not stirring up the political hornet’s nest of the conservative ideologues who want a death penalty, rather than giving in to the desires of many of the people who actually voted for him back in November.

Because like I wrote earlier, it was Brady who was the candidate who included in his views on issues the belief that we need to resume executing people. Quinn, by his desire to keep the moratorium, was the candidate for voters who want to see an end to the death penalty in Illinois.

NOW QUINN THINKS he can appease the people on this issue who didn’t support him by giving them their desire? It doesn’t work that way. Those people won’t give Quinn one bit of credit for doing so. His backers, however, would take a veto of this bill as a blow to their collective kneecaps.

If anything, I think President Barack Obama can be used as an example of what happens if Quinn vetoes a death penalty repeal – or takes a day and forever to figure out what to do.

Not that Obama has taken on any significant death penalty issues during his time as president. For Obama, the issue is immigration reform.

He has tossed out the rhetoric in his books and occasional presidential statements indicating he comprehends why reform of the federal immigration statutes are needed. But his actions to move in that direction have been weak. We don’t have immigration reform. In fact, we have a new House of Representatives that likely is going to start pushing for punitive measures on immigration policy that will worsen the situation.

THE RESULT FOR Obama is a growing Latino voter bloc that isn’t sure whether the president is the enemy, or just an incompetent. If any other candidate were to come along in 2012 and show even the slightest bit of interest on the issue, it could hurt Obama.

And while sometimes political officials take negative actions to show that they’re not controlled by a certain group in hopes that it will gain them support elsewhere, that hasn’t been the case here.

I haven’t heard the conservative ideologues crack Obama one break because his staff stood in the way of immigration reform. All the rancid rhetoric about him being a “socialist” is heard as loud as ever in certain quarters.

Just like Quinn won’t catch a break by vetoing the death penalty. The kind of people who would get most worked up over the issue are the ones who will find plenty of other issues with which to object to Pat.

SO GOVERNOR, PLEASE, just sign the bill. Abolition is a long-overdue act, and it’s not like we have a functioning death penalty process anymore. This would just bring Illinois law into compliance with actual practice.

Nobody needs to have to make the trip to Tamms in the early minutes of the new day to watch someone get drugged to death (it is classified as a “homicide”) in the name of justice.

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