Illinois outlaws death penalty

In Illinois, capital punishment is no more.
Today Governor Pat Quinn:

► Signed legislation abolishing the death penalty,
► Commuted all existing death sentences to life without parole, and
► Pledged to commute any death sentence levied before the law takes effect on July 1.

In his signing statement, Quinn said that he had:

concluded that our system of imposing the death penalty is inherently flawed. The evidence presented to me by former prosecutors and judges with decades of experience in the criminal justice system has convinced me that it is impossible to devise a system that is consistent, that is free of discrimination on the basis of race, geography or economic circumstance, and that always gets it right.
As a state, we cannot tolerate the executions of innocent people because such actions strike at the very legitimacy of a government.

Threatening government's legitimacy, he explained, was the troubling fact that since 1977, 20 persons condemned to Illinois' death row had been exonerated in postconviction innocence proceedings. It is that, more than anything, that today makes Illinois the 2d of the country's 5 most populous states to move into the abolitionist column. (By turning blue on the map below (credit), Illinois joins a Midwestern consensus that spreads over to Iowa and up to North Dakota and Michigan.) Said Quinn of the wrongful capital convictions:

To say that this is unacceptable does not even begin to express the profound regret and shame we, as a society, must bear for these failures of justice.

He questioned claims that capital punishment has a deterrent effect, and further stated that

the enormous sums expended by the state in maintaining a death penalty system would be better spent on preventing crime and assisting victims’ families in overcoming their pain and grief.

Quinn, a Catholic who made the announcement on Ash Wednesday, drew support from a quote the late Joseph Bernardin, long Cardinal of Chicago's archdiocese. He expressed thanks for guidance from others -- "prosecutors, judges, elected officials, religious leaders from around the world, families of murder victims, people on death row who were exonerated and ordinary citizens" -- whom he did not identify by name.

Names of at least 3 persons jump to the mind amid this fundamental change in the governance of this 'Grrl's birth state. Recently retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who often criticized the administration of capital punishment in appearances before lawyers in his native Chicago, and whose recent New York Review of Books essay made points echoedin Quinn's statement. Professor Larry Marshall, who spearheaded innocence cases during his long tenure at Northwestern University School of Law (from which Governor Quinn, Justice Stevens, my classmate Larry, and I all received J.D.s). And the late U.S. District Judge Prentice H. Marshall, who spoke against the death penalty at a commemoration of Haymarket I attended while clerking for him years ago. One imagines each would agree with the words with which the governor concluded today:

... I firmly believe that we are taking an important step forward in our history as Illinois joins the 15 other states and many nations of the world that have abolished the death penalty.

Reading for tomorrow's class

Just kidding ...

Enjoy sleeping in late tomorrow! Then get to work on those papers!!

MW

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I've never seen such a cute professor ...

Leading Up to Execution, Virginia Woman Asks for Clemency, Tests

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/09/15/leading-up-to-execution-virginia-woman-asks-for-clemency-tests/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wsj/law/feed+(WSJ.com:+Law+Blog)

SEPTEMBER 15, 2010, 3:54 PM ET

By Ashby Jones

The death-penalty debate never ends; it just moves to another jurisdiction.

A few months ago, all eyes were on the situation with Ronnie Lee Gardner, a Utah man who chose to be executed by firing squad (and ultimately was).

The spotlight has since swung to the case of Teresa Lewis (pictured), a Pittsylvania County, Virginia woman set to die by lethal injection next week. Quick web searches turn up all kinds of news and information about Lewis. But newcomers to the saga could do worse than read this Time article to get up to speed.

As is characteristic in death-penalty cases, the facts are ugly. The lead paragraph from Time writers Katy Steinmetz and Alex Altman sets the stage well:

After midnight on Oct. 30, 2002, two men crept into an unlocked trailer in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. A family of three was sleeping. Toting shotguns, the intruders roused Teresa Lewis, now 40, and told her to leave the bedroom she shared with her husband Julian. One of the men shot Julian several times. The other intruder stalked down the hall and put five bullets into Julian’s son, C.J., a U.S. Army reservist. The intruders divvied up the cash in Julian’s wallet and fled the trailer. About 45 minutes later, Teresa Lewis called the police to report that her husband and stepson had been killed. But when the police arrived, Julian Lewis was still alive. Among his last words was an ominous accusation: “My wife knows who done this to me.”

She did. As detailed in court documents, Teresa Lewis had paid the shooters — Matthew Shallenberger, 22, and Rodney Fuller, 19 — to kill her husband and stepson.

Lewis wound up pleading guilty in 2003, and the judge on the case sentenced her to die by lethal injection.

As the eleventh-hour ticks away, the debate has turned to whether Lewis is mentally competent. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the execution of mentally incompetent people violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

So far, Lewis has scored badly on IQ tests — scoring as low as 70 in one — but she never tested in the range that would have deemed her mentally incompetent. (Her lawyers also claim she was addicted to prescription painkillers and suffered from a personality disorder.)

Her lawyers have asked Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell to commuter her sentence. And on Wednesday, the Arc of Virginia, a group that advocates for the mentally disabled, joined in, asking for time to at least give Lewis a full psychological evaluation, something that he says hasn’t yet been done.

Her execution is set for Sept. 23.