Six years after Ryan's unilateral move set off a wave of capital punishment reforms nationwide, conservative prosecutors throughout the state are hoping a change at the Governor's Mansion this fall can usher back the death penalty. While Democratic incumbent Rod Blagojevich has said Ryan's moratorium should remain in place, at least for the foreseeable future, his Republican challenger and state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka has hinted that enough safeguards have now been put into place for the death penalty to be reinstated.
"It's time to have a Governor who exercises authority in the way it was intended," said Topinka's running mate Joseph Birkett, the state's attorney in Republican DuPage County, who helped author some of the reforms in Illinois. "People felt betrayed by what Ryan did."
Only seven inmates currently sit on Illinois Death Row, where about 170 were before Ryan cleared it out shortly before leaving office three years ago. Even though no executions can currently be carried out, the death sentence can still be handed down, and some 200 cases are currently in the pipeline in which prosecutors have signaled their intention to seek capital punishment.
The moratorium has had no practical effect and I think it would be good to lift it, said Thomas Brown, the chief prosecutor for rural Livingston County, who won a new death sentence for the only person who was cleared from Death Row by Ryan but then returned for a separate murder case. Weve had to start filling it back up one by one, and theres no case thats ripe yet so it could be 15 or 20 years of appeals before anyone actually is executed (if the moratorium gets lifted). Theres this push for perfection. But that raises the argument, how do you perfect a system?
Illinois certainly has tried to do just that. Shortly after Ryan granted clemency to some and commuted all other death sentences to life in prison, the state launched a major study and overhaul of the system. At the time, about thirteen inmates on Death Row had been found innocent and freed, one more than the number who had been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. New reforms adopted included an overhaul in police lineups to guard against false identifications, the videotaping of most murder confessions, some state Supreme Court oversight of capital cases to make sure they are handled fairly and the requirement that criminal defense attorneys be sufficiently qualified to try such cases.(Investigations of Illinois system revealed that in some death cases, defense attorneys had never tried a murder before. In other cases, the attorneys nodded off, napping during trial at the defense table.)
We had the worst record in the country in terms of sending innocent people to Death Row, said Gov. Blagojevich's spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff. We have enacted major reforms here to prevent future injustices, but a system that was so obviously broken cant be fixed overnight."
The debate over Illinois's pioneering roll back of the death penalty comes as more and more states are conducting their own reappraisals. In recent years, states from New York and New Jersey to Kansas, Virginia, Kentucky and California, have either enacted a similar moratorium, had certain executions ruled out by the courts or at least started doing comprehensive studies of the death penalty system.
Across the country, death sentences and executions are both down, according to Richard Dieter, head of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. Even public support is down, from about 80 percent in 1994 to 64 percent now," says Dieter. "There is simply concern around the country about innocence and I think it would be strange to jump back into regular executions until there was more confidence. Dieter clearly hopes that day will not come. But in Illinois, it now seems possible that a loss of confidence in one of the death penalty's most outspoken and notable opponents may help bring it back to life.