Letter to the Governor
Chicago Council of Lawyers
Chicago’s Public Interest Bar Association
750 North Lake Shore Drive, Fourth Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60611
Telephone: (312) 988-6565 Fax (312) 397-1338
E-mail: ccl@chicagocouncil.org Website: www.chicagocouncil.org
January 19, 2011
Governor Pat Quinn
Office of the Governor
James R. Thompson Center
100 W. Randolph, 16-100
Chicago, IL 60601
Dear Governor Quinn:
With the Illinois General Assembly’s passage of a bill that would abolish the death penalty, our state appears poised to take the necessary step of eliminating capital punishment. We ask that you do the right thing and sign the bill now. Capital punishment in our state not only remains a broken system, but as is becoming increasingly clear, it is a system we can no longer afford.
In 1997, the Chicago Council of Lawyers, a public interest bar association, called on all three branches of Illinois government to impose a moratorium on the death penalty after it became known that our state had imposed death sentences on several people who were actually innocent. Then-Governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium in 2000 and established a Commission on Capital Punishment, which made 85 recommendations for reform. Also in 2000, the Chicago Council of Lawyers issued a 56-page report entitled Due Process and the Death Penalty in Illinois, which made additional recommendations aimed at improving the trial and post-conviction procedures in capital cases. In 2007, we issued a statement calling for the death penalty to be abolished if all of the recommendations of the Governor’s Commission and the Council were not adopted. They were not adopted in full, and in December 2008, the Council called for the immediate abolition of capital punishment amid the lack of genuine reform.
Two more years passed with no real action toward reform. In October 2010, the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee issued its final report and concluded that many of the issues identified in 2002 by the Governor’s Commission had yet to be addressed. The bipartisan Committee, which the General Assembly created to evaluate the impact and sufficiency of a partial set of capital punishment reforms enacted in 2003, also concluded after six years of study that “there is a tremendous additional cost entailed when the death penalty is sought,” and the Committee identified “what appears to be a trend by prosecutors to ask for the death penalty in order to shift costs from the local counties to the State, and to increase their bargaining power in negotiations for pleas of guilty.”
Aside from the issue that the General Assembly has not acted comprehensively to institute adequate reforms, its vote this month to abolish appears to acknowledge that the state simply cannot afford the “tremendous additional cost” associated with the death penalty. We agree, and both of these factors are compelling arguments in favor of signing the bill into law.
In addition, we noted that during the debate on the House and Senate floors this month, death penalty proponents argued that abolition would take away the ability of law enforcement officers to threaten suspects or witnesses with the death penalty in order to secure their cooperation. Needless to say, our state ought not to retain the death penalty so that it may be used as a cudgel by law enforcement during interrogations.
We also heard arguments that death penalty abolition ought not to be abolished in this legislative session because somehow policymakers need more time to consider it. Yet the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee has looked at the efficacy of death penalty reforms for the past six years, and the deeply rooted problems with our system of capital punishment are well-known to anyone familiar with the capital punishment debate in Illinois in the past 14 years since the Council first called for a moratorium. The time to act is now.
In short, we did not hear any persuasive argument as to why the death penalty should remain law in the face of the overwhelming evidence that Illinois has not been able to administer it fairly and justly, and in the face of our state’s growing concern that it can no longer afford to maintain this broken system of capital punishment.
For all of these reasons, abolition of the death penalty is good public policy. It is the right thing to do. We urge you to sign the bill.
Sincerely,
Gabriel A. Fuentes
President, Chicago Council of Lawyers