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HOUSE RESOLUTION (1st Draft)

2 WHEREAS, A moratorium on the use of capital punishment was

3 instituted in Illinois in 2000; and

4 WHEREAS, The current Governor and his administration have

5 continued the moratorium as a policy in Illinois pending the results

6 from the Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee; and

7 WHEREAS, Criminals continue to murder innocent people

8 throughout the State of Illinois in spite of the existence of

9 the death penalty; and

10 WHEREAS, Since the inception of the moratorium, several

11 defendants have been found guilty of first degree murder and

12 have been given a death sentence; and

13 WHEREAS, the moratorium has largely been symbolic because no

14 inmates have faced imminent execution dates; and

15

16 WHEREAS, Families of the victims of criminals who have

17 killed their loved ones do not receive closure from any mere

18 punishment given to a killer; and

19

HR0969 - 2 - LRB095 14925 RLC 40870 r

1 WHEREAS, Not one shred of evidence has demonstrated that

2 the death penalty decreases crime or makes society any safer; and

3 WHEREAS, the death penalty is incredibly expensive for Illinois

taxpayers; and

4 WHEREAS, national research supports life without parole as the

5 clearly preferred sentence for the worst killers; and

6 Therefore, be it

7 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE

8 NINETY-FIFTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we

9 call upon the legislature to abolish capital punishment and replace

10 it with the sentence of life without the possibility of parole in

11 Illinois; and we urge the Governor to sign such legislation to

12 repeal the death penalty and replace it with life without the

13 possibility of parole.

14

15 RESOLVED, That a suitable copy of this resolution be

16 forwarded to the Governor of the State of Illinois.

Pate gets death penalty for double homicide

By Len Wells
Saturday, March 15, 2008

A White County, Ill., jury deliberated for four hours Friday afternoon before deciding an Omaha, Ill., farmworker should be put to death for the May 16, 2006, murders of his estranged wife and her daughter.

Gary D. Pate, 37, was found guilty by the same jury a week ago for the shooting deaths of his estranged wife, Kathleen Pate, 41, and her daughter, Amanda Jeffers, 16. They were shot to death at a home they shared in the southern White County community of Norris City. Both had been shot four times.

The jury began deliberations at 11:30 a.m. Friday, and announced to Resident Judge Tom Sutton they had reached a unanimous decision on the death penalty at 3:30 p.m. Had their decision been anything but unanimous, Sutton could not have imposed the death penalty.

Pate did not take the witness stand during the trial, but did testify during the mitigation phase of the trial earlier this week.

"I'm sorry for the kid," Pate testified, but expressed no remorse for the death of his estranged wife.

Sutton set Pate's execution date for May 16 — the two-year anniversary of the slayings. One of Pate's defense attorneys, Jerry Crisel, said after the decision was rendered that he would be filing a motion for a new trial.

Under Illinois law, Pate will also be entitled to an automatic appeal of the death penalty to the Illinois Supreme Court.

It took three weeks to seat a jury for Pate's trial. The jury selection process was delayed twice — once when Pate fell ill with an abscessed tooth and a second time when the courthouse in Carmi was closed because of an ice storm. The trial itself lasted two weeks, with the aggravation and mitigation phase lasting another week, concluding with the death penalty decision Friday afternoon.

Pate has been held in the White County jail at Carmi under $2.5 million bond since his arrest just hours after the slayings.

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2008/mar/15/pate-gets-death-penalty-for-double-homicide/

An Illinois jury deliberated for less than two hours when deciding the fate of Eric C. Hanson.  They returned quickly with a sentence of death.  Hanson now becomes the 14th individual on Illinois' death row. 

The DuPage County State's Attorney, Joseph Birkett, will likely use this sentence to reinforce his call for lifting the moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois. 

The jury deliberated for less than three hours when deciding the verdict.  They deliberated for thirty minutes when deciding Hanson's eligibility for death.

Their decision came as no surprise to anyone in the courtroom.  They showed little emotion as the victim impact statements were read.  A sign that their decision was already made.  Before the defense had an opportunity to present mitigation.

More about this case will be written in the next day or so.

Time to debate death penalty
Published in the Belleville News-Democrat - February 14, 2008

Belleville News-Democrat Editorial

It's not often that proponents and opponents of the death penalty agree on anything, but both sides are calling for an end to Illinois' moratorium on capital punishment.

It has been eight years since former Gov. George Ryan imposed the moratorium, and there are no signs of it being lifted.

The Illinois State's Attorneys Association just called for Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift the moratorium and agree to enforce the law. State Rep. Dennis Reboletti has introduced a similar resolution.

Thirteen people have been sentenced to death since Ryan cleared death row in 2003 with a blanket commutation. "We shouldn't ask jurors to impose the death penalty and not have the courage to carry it out," Reboletti told the Chicago Tribune.

The Abolition in Illinois Movement also wants the moratorium lifted and the law repealed. They see no purpose in what's happening now -- spending millions of tax dollars on death penalty cases when such sentences may never be carried out. The group said Illinois has spent $148 million on death penalty cases from a special fund set up eight years ago -- and that's just part of the costs.

This issue needs to be decided, so Illinois can get out of this legal limbo. If we're going to have a capital punishment law on the books, we need to be ready and willing to enforce it. And if we don't want it, Blagojevich and lawmakers should repeal the law and quit hiding behind the moratorium.

Belleville News-Democrat

AIM Responds to Editorial

The Abolition in Illinois Movement is NOT calling for an end to the moratorium. We are calling for the end of capital punishment in Illinois which, in effect, would end the moratorium.

Our Opinion: Do not resume executions

Published in the Springfield Journal-Register-

February 19,2008

By the Springfield Journal-Register Editorial Board

LAST WEEK, state Rep. Dennis Reboletti, R-Elmhurst, and DuPage County State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett teamed up to urge Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift the state’s death penalty moratorium and resume the practice of capital punishment.

Reboletti has introduced a House resolution asking the governor to end the state’s eight-year moratorium on executions. He and Birkett said Illinois’ capital punishment system, overhauled after an examination by a 14-member commission, has been fixed.

We welcome the debate this resolution may bring on the Illinois House floor, but we believe lawmakers should arrive at a different conclusion than that of Reboletti and and Birkett.

WE BELIEVE that any system that logged a record of 12 executions and 13 wrongful convictions should not be fixed. It should be scrapped.

The problems identified by Gov. George Ryan’s commission certainly made the system in Illinois more likely to sentence innocent people to death. Coerced confessions, insufficient legal representation, questionable testimony from jailhouse snitches and lack of DNA resources were among the problems the commission found and Illinois law addressed.

But we think those were mere symptoms of the real problem. The real problem is the death penalty itself, which will always use the weight of emotions to tip the scales of justice.

Scott Turow, the best-selling author and former federal prosecutor who served on Ryan’s commission, outlined the problem brilliantly in a 2003 essay in The New Yorker magazine.

“Capital punishment is supposed to be applied only to the most heinous crimes, but it is precisely those cases which, because of the strong feelings of repugnance they evoke, most thoroughly challenge the detached judgment of all participants in the legal process — police, prosecutors, judges, and juries,” Turow writes. (The full article can be found by searching for “Turow” in the archive section of www.newyorker.com.)

Turow points out that the wrongly accused are particularly susceptible to landing on death row because they are unlikely to accept plea bargains with lesser sentences for crimes they did not commit. They demand trials, then face juries that — by Supreme Court ruling — can’t empanel anyone who voices opposition to capital punishment.

WE ALSO FIND an ugly irony in Birkett’s involvement in this call to resume executions.

Birkett is now seeking the death penalty for Brian Dugan in the 1983 kidnapping, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. Perhaps more than any other, the Nicarico case became synonymous with wrongful prosecution in Illinois when two men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, were wrongfully sentenced to death. Dugan had confessed to the Nicarico murder when the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office embarked on a second trial of Cruz and Hernandez. Eventually, three DuPage County prosecutors and four police officers were indicted — and later acquitted — for their handling of the case.

Birkett was not involved in the Cruz/Hernandez prosecutions, but he was an assistant state’s attorney in the DuPage office during the process. His exposure to those cases should have taught him how public pressure for revenge can impinge on the judicial system’s duty to impose justice.

IN THEIR press conference last week, Birkett and Reboletti said even if the moratorium were lifted today, Illinois would not see an execution for 10 years due to legal appeals guaranteed to Illinois’ 13 current death row inmates. In our view, that is all the more reason to stop pursuing executions. The appeals process is cumbersome and expensive, as is the process of housing prisoners on death row. New Jersey decided as much in December and abolished capital punishment.

In Illinois, though, we think any decision on capital punishment need only come down to the state’s horrid record. A state that measured 12 executions against 13 near executions of innocent people should not ever purport to restart a “just” system of capital punishment.

http://www.sj-r.com/Opinion/stories/25434.asp

Moratorium good; end of death penalty is better

Published in the Rockford Register Star-

February 19, 2008

By the Rockford Register Star Editorial Board

We appreciate Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s refusal to resume executions in Illinois, despite loud requests from people who think the state’s death machine has been idle long enough. The governor said he’s not persuaded yet that reforms put in place in recent years have fixed the system.

If he’s waiting to be 100 percent certain the death penalty will be applied accurately and fairly in all cases, he’ll be waiting forever. That’s fine with us. The only foolproof and moral option, in our view, is to abolish the death penalty. Period.

Some are not content to do that or to wait any longer to resume executions. They say that because the state still has a law on the books, it ought to be used.

“We shouldn’t ask jurors to impose the death penalty and not have the courage to carry it out,” said state Rep. Dennis Reboletti of Elmhurst, a proponent of ending the state’s eight-year moratorium on executions. DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett joined Reboletti in demanding that executions be resumed.

The answer to that dilemma is to stop asking juries to sentence people to death. And courage has nothing to do with it. The applicable words might be fairness, accuracy and morality. The death penalty will never meet those standards.

The lethal injection gurneys have been parked since 2000 when then-Gov. George Ryan halted executions because of a high error rate on death penalty convictions.

Between 1977 and 2000, the state had executed 12 people. During that same period, 13 inmates were released because of wrongful convictions! That horrendous accuracy rate led Ryan to commute to life in prison the death sentences of all 167 inmates on Illinois’ death row.

He also appointed a commission to study the issue and suggest reforms. The list of needed reforms was lengthy, and the Legislature adopted much of it. One of the more publicized reforms required videotaped interrogations of murder suspects. The legislation contained other reforms, including a provision that would allow judges to rule out the death penalty as a sentencing option when the cases rested on a single eyewitness or police informant, the latter being particularly unreliable.

Experts on the commission, however, said the reforms adopted by the Legislature didn’t go far enough to ensure the death penalty was fairly and accurately applied.

Arguments Reboletti and Birkett make in favor of resuming executions also can be used to argue that state-sanctioned killing should never be resumed.

They want the governor to review each death penalty case to make sure it passes muster for fairness and accuracy before giving a green light to execution. That argument merely emphasizes how subjective this process is and how justice can be applied so differently, depending on the skills of the prosecutor and the defense attorney, the makeup of a jury, the color, income level and even occupation of the victim and the defendant. The reforms did not iron out those wrinkles.

Birkett argued that even if the governor lifted the moratorium, nobody could be executed for at least 10 years, given the appeals process, etc. That rationale only emphasizes the length and expense of death penalty cases.

In addition, they are “jumping the gun,” so to speak, in calling for the moratorium to be lifted. A state committee that has been reviewing the effectiveness of reforms is supposed to give a report later this year.

It seems uncommonly bloodthirsty not to even wait for that.

http://www.rrstar.com/opinions/x1637128089

Death Penalty

Published in the Daily Herald-

February 23, 2008

By the Daily Herald Editorial Board

It's not often that proponents and opponents of the death penalty agree on anything, but both sides are calling for an end to Illinois' moratorium on capital punishment.

It has been eight years since former Gov. George Ryan imposed the moratorium, and there are no signs of it being lifted.

The Illinois State's Attorneys Association just called for Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift the moratorium and agree to enforce the law. State Rep. Dennis Reboletti has introduced a similar resolution.

The Abolition in Illinois Movement also wants the moratorium lifted and the law repealed. They see no purpose in what's happening now -- spending millions of tax dollars on death penalty cases when such sentences may never be carried out. The group said Illinois has spent $148 million on death penalty cases from a special fund set up eight years ago…

This issue needs to be decided, so Illinois can get out of this legal limbo. If we're going to have a capital punishment law on the books, we need to be ready and willing to enforce it. And if we don't want it, Blagojevich and lawmakers should repeal the law and quit hiding behind the moratorium.

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=140158&src=

In light of the recent call to lift the moratorium, numerous Illinois papers have in fact responded with a call for abolition.  The next four posts will detail articles released this week by newspapers in Illinois.  The Abolition in Illinois Movement was mentioned in the majority of these editorials due to its recent study on the costs of capital punishment in Illinois.

Enjoy the editorials...

Call for death penalty is oddly out of place

Tribune staff report

February 17, 2008

I realize that Du Page County State's Atty. Joe Birkett and many other prosecutors across Illinois are very itchy to have the state resume executions. The last one was nearly 9 years ago, just before then-Gov. George Ryan unilaterally declared a moratorium on the practice.

But it took a lot of nerve for Birkett to hold a news conference last week at the DuPage County sheriff's office calling on Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift the moratorium.

Why? Because many of us consider the DuPage County sheriff's office to be the birthplace of the movement that gave rise to moratorium in the first place: It was there that lawmen botched the investigation into the murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. Their blundering led to two innocent men being sent to Death Row and galvanized the legal and journalistic communities to uncover the raft of other injustices that prompted Ryan to declare the capital system "broken."

www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-change_birkett_bd17feb17,0,211861.story

DuPage leaders revive death penalty debate
Published in the Daily Herald - January 13, 2008

By Christy Gutowski


Three DuPage County Republicans called Tuesday for Gov. Rod Blagojevich to lift Illinois' moratorium on executions.

They did so, though, on the heels of a study that chronicles the high cost of death penalty cases. The group behind the study is lobbying legislators to abolish capital punishment.

Both sides agree, though, movement on the controversial issue will be slow -- especially in an election year.

Illinois' 13 condemned inmates are several years away from exhausting appeal rights, but the Republicans urged Blagojevich to send a message to juries that the death penalty still is the law.

DuPage County State's Attorney Joseph Birkett noted that changes were made to improve the system since the moratorium was imposed eight years ago. State reps. Dennis Reboletti of Elmhurst and Randy Ramey of Carol Stream joined him at a morning news conference.

"The bottom line is the reforms are in place and are working," said Birkett, president of the Illinois State's Attorneys Association. "Everyone has done their job."

The group introduced other measures, such as making it a capital crime to kill a child 16 or younger; the current law is age 12. Birkett also wants to reduce the number of factors, from 21 to 9, that make a crime eligible for death.

Others have joined the debate as well. Anita Alvarez, the Democratic nominee for Cook County state's attorney, called for a statewide advisory referendum on the death penalty.

The last man executed in Illinois was Andrew Kokoraleis, in May 1999, for nearly 20 cult-like mutilation slayings of women in Cook and DuPage counties in the 1980s.

In Illinois, 18 condemned inmates were exonerated early this decade after reinstatement of capital punishment in 1974. Former Gov. George Ryan cited some of those cases as an example of a broken system when he declared the moratorium on executions. And later, on Dec. 19, 2002, he commuted death sentences to life terms.

An unofficial moratorium remains in place today, but judges and juries still hand out death sentences.

On the other side of the debate, death penalty opponents are lobbying just as hard for abolition. They favor expanding mandatory life-without-parole sentences and using some of the death penalty funds for counseling services for crime victims.

The Abolition in Illinois Movement released a study that suggests Illinois spent $148 million on death penalty cases since a special fund was set up eight years ago. Members say that figure does not include the cost of incarceration, appeals, some salaries and execution expenses.

"We agree the moratorium is not good for prosecutors," said Elliot Slosar of the abolition group. "We sympathize with the legal limbo it has placed them in, and, while we concur that the moratorium needs to end, bringing executions back is not the solution. Abolition is."

The debate has stirred many changes. For example, police must videotape interrogations with murder suspects and a judge must determine the reliability of jailhouse informants before they are allowed to testify.

Lawmakers also gave the Illinois Supreme Court greater power to toss out unjust verdicts, offered defendants more access to evidence and barred execution in cases that hinge on one witness.

And defendants in capital cases also must be represented by at least two lawyers. The lead lawyer must be qualified by a special review board. And a state fund, cited in the anti-death penalty cost study, was established to ensure poor defendants can afford a fair trial.

Other reforms include requiring police to preserve evidence longer in major cases and to hand over all their notes in homicide probes to prosecutors, who in turn must share them with the defense before trial. Birkett also helped expand convicted defendants' access to DNA testing on appeal if it wasn't available at trial.

Slosar, though, argues that's not good enough. He said only 35 of a recommended 85 reforms are in place and cites examples in his study in which some reforms, such as the state fund, have been abused.

Of Illinois' condemned, 31-year-old Anthony Mertz would be the first to face execution, but not for another decade. He was convicted of killing Rolling Meadows native Shannon McNamara, 21,

while at Eastern Illinois University in 2001.

"We need the governor to make a decision as to where he is on this," Reboletti said. "We can't wait until these other appeals come through and then some other General Assembly will have to deal with it."

A message left at the governor's office was not returned Tuesday.

Illinois' Death Row

• Rodney Adkins, 44, for the 2003 murder of an Oak Park woman who walked in on him as he burglarized her condo.

• Teodoro Baez, 31, for a 1999 double murder in which the victims were dismembered with a samurai sword after a drug dispute near Chicago.

• Dion Banks, 45, for the 2001 shooting death of a woman in front of her two young sons during a carjacking in the Ford City Mall parking lot.

• Joseph Bannister, 39, for wounding his ex-girlfriend and killing her sister during a 2000 attack in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood.

• Ricardo Harris, 43, for the 1999 murder of two Oak Lawn liquor store clerks during an attempted burglary, in which two customers also were injured.

• Laurence Lovejoy, 41, for the rape and murder of his 16-year-old stepdaughter, Erin Justice, in 2004 in Aurora.

• Anthony Mertz, 31, for the 2001 murder of Rolling Meadows native Shannon McNamara, 21, in her off-campus apartment at Eastern Illinois University.

• Brian Nelson, 25, for killing his former girlfriend, her brother, her father and her father's girlfriend outside Peotone in 2002.

• Daniel Ramsey, 29, for the July 1996 shooting deaths of two girls, ages 16 and 12, and wounding his former girlfriend and three toddlers in Hancock County.

• Paul Runge, 37, for the rapes and murders of a woman and her 10-year-old daughter in their Chicago apartment in 1997.

• Cecil Sutherland, 52, for the 1987 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Amy Schulz, of Kell, Ill., in Jefferson County.

• Curtis Thompson, 65, for the 2002 shooting deaths of three people, including a sheriff's deputy, in rural Stark County.

• Andrew Urdiales, 43, for the 1996 murder of a 21-year-old Hammond woman in Livingston County.

Source: Daily Herald archives; state prison records

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=133337