A clarion call is being sounded for those who support repealing the Illinois death penalty to speak up and toll the bell for justice and human rights now. As a persistent public supporter of human rights on other issues, particularly when it came to the LBGT community of which I'm a part of, I have responded by not being silent on the issue of the death penalty. I invite you to speak out as well.
Over the next couple weeks, the Illinois General Assembly must hear your public voice with a simple message, "Repeal the death penalty." Ten years ago—due to documentation of serious and persistent flaws, and borne of the successful campaign halt executions—a moratorium was declared, and executions were halted. Since the moratorium began, the count of wrongful convictions and exonerations from Illinois death sentences increased to number 20 men. Illinois is second in the national with exonerations from the death penalty. The current count of exonerations nationally numbers 139 men.
The lesson learned since the moratorium is that as a public policy the death penalty is a failure. Simply put, the death penalty risks executing the innocent, does not meet victims' families needs and costs more than the alternatives.
Over the years, two groups' poignant testimony challenged the equation that vengeance equals justice. The victims' families and death penalty exoneree's voices from the Witness to Innocence Project have strengthened the proposition that the death penalty is a faulty public policy.
The death penalty ignores the real needs of victims' families who need counseling and other services. Recently I spoke with Sarah Hire, one of the many voices from victims' families who support repeal of the death penalty. For Hire, it boiled down to not furthering the pain and beginning a healing process. The family united in urging the Fort Wayne, Ind., prosecutor not to seek the death penalty in her stepfather's murder after an initial disagreement. Hire's stepfather was murdered by a man whose family included a woman from an overlapping social circle within Fort Wayne, Ind.'s, lesbian community. Hire emphatically viewed the impact the tragedy had upon both families.
In early November, I visited a few General Assembly members' offices with the Florida exonerees Juan Melendez and Shabaka WaQlimi. They had traveled to Illinois for a Witness to Innocence conference to support the repeal campaign. WaQlimi came within a dozen hours of the electric chair. Collectively, each exoneree's case exemplifies the cascading failures of misconduct, faulty investigations and a plethora of other flaws in death penalty cases. Extraordinary efforts, from outside the legal system, uncovered the truth and made the exonerations possible.
One failure is that prosecutors have also used homophobia against defendants when seeking the death penalty. The trials that led to the executions of Wanda Jean Allen ( Oklahoma ) and Stanley Lingar ( Missouri ) are examples where such bias played a role in the convictions. Meanwhile, in two historic instances—the Matthew Shepard case and the 2003 Illinois commutation from death row—LBGT groups opposed the death penalty.
The cries for fiscal responsibility that have gripped the country should not stop short of critical examination of the costs of the death penalty. The alternatives to the death penalty are demonstrably less expensive than the more than $100 million spent since 2003 in Illinois on the capital-defense litigation fund. That figure represents only a portion of the costs of the death penalty.
I have a passion for death-penalty repeal because I spent my formative and educational years in Michigan, the first English-speaking polity to abolish the death penalty. In 1846, while joining the union, with an experience not too dissimilar from the modern track record on the death penalty, Michigan ended the practice. Using the actions of an earlier generation as a source of inspiration has been a driving force for me when I became an active participant in Illinois' death-penalty abolition efforts. Like the public of 19th-century Michigan, Illinois has gained the knowledge that, despite all the safeguards, when it comes to the death penalty, the system makes mistakes.
It's time to resolve this public-policy debate, and repeal the Illinois death penalty.
W. Robert Schultz, III, is a board member of the Illinois Coalition for Abolition of the Death Penalty and has campaigned for death-penalty repeal since the 2000 moratorium. For more information, contact www.ICADP.org .
