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62 a broken death penalty system and governor george ryan Prior to 1976, Illinois executed 348 prisoners, 81 of whom were black.1 Since 1976, Illinois had fifteen prisoners on death row and had executed twelve prisoners. In 2000, the Nation reported that 49 percent of the death sentences imposed in Illinois had been reversed by the state’s Supreme Court, pending retrial or resentencing. These reversals were in response to judicial errors, incompetent defense attorneys, and prosecutorial misconduct.2 In response to a string of wrongful convictions in 1999, the Chicago Tribune investigated the 285 capital cases handled by the Illinois criminal justice system since the state’s death penalty statute went into effect in 1977 and published a five-part series titled “Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois.”3 The newspaper found that nearly half of the state’s capital convictions had been overturned on appeal. Moreover, in 46 cases, important testimony had come from jailed informants often in exchange for lighter sentences. Investigators also noted that in 33 Illinois capital cases, defense lawyers assigned by the state “had been disbarred or suspended—sanctions reserved for conduct so incompetent, unethical or even criminal the lawyer’s license is taken away.”4 Additional problems included misconduct by prosecutors and police, flaws in forensic evidence, and the deliberate exclusion of African Americans from jury duty.5 In 35 cases, the Tribune reported, black defendants were sentenced to death by all-white juries.The Tribune findings were widely reported across the United States. At hearings in Springfield and Chicago, defense attorneys argued that the system has wrongly sent at least thirteen men to death row.6 After Illinois released thirteen prisoners from death row, Governor George Ryan put a halt to executions in the state for eighteen months. Some of the men who had received death sentences were shown to be innocent, while others had not received fair trials.7 And the governor 5 The Abolition of Capital Punishment in illinois abolition in illinois 63 was considering whether to follow up his moratorium by commuting the sentences of all Illinois death-row inmates.8 By executive order on 9 March 2000, Ryan formed the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment—a body evenly divided between death penalty supporters and abolitionists—to study the issue. The commission recommended reforms that would significantly restrict the conditions under which a death sentence could be imposed—although even these changes might not prevent innocent people from being executed.The Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment issued its final report on 15 April 2002.9 The Northwestern University School of Journalism was centrally involved in the process. As of 2004, thirteen Illinois death row prisoners had been exonerated with the help of Northwestern’s Medill Innocence Project—essentially David Protess, a professor at the school, and his students . Yet since Gregg v. Georgia, Illinois had executed twelve people. Ryan said of his state’s death penalty: “‘It’s like flipping a coin’—that is, a 50–50 game of chance with someone’s life at stake.”10 In a letter to the Chicago Daily Herald, a reader named Bill Ryan noted that 260 Illinois prisoners had been condemned and that 13 exonerated prisoners had spent “a combined total of 115 years surviving the horrors of death row for crimes they did not commit.” He observed that the overturned convictions were due to the efforts of “journalism students, lawyers and in many cases [they were a result of ] plain luck”—had the system had run its course, the 13 innocent people would have been killed as well.11 In 2002 Glenn Pierce and Michael Radelet reported on a study they had conducted of Illinois death sentencing, which was funded by the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment. The authors found significant racial discrepancies in sentencing.12 First, Pierce and Radelet noted that sentencing someone to death was an extremely rare event in Illinois. From 1977 to 1980, only 1 percent of homicides resulted in a death sentence. And from 1977 to 2002, whites comprised over 75 percent of the total population of the state, but less than 35 percent of those sentenced to death. Only 4 of the 101 whites sentenced to death had been convicted of killing an African American. Nearly 60 percent of those sentenced to death—regardless of their race—had been convicted of killing whites. The result was that in 2002, 63 percent of the 173 people on death row in...

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