Spring 1999

Illinois Legislature First to Call for Moratorium
Shepherd Case Stirs Calls for Non-violence
Remembering Justice Blackmun
Everyone Can Help Spread the Word!
Death Penalty Rejected in Massachusetts
Violence Breeds Violence
Model Resolution for a Moratorium on Executions
Moratorium Organizing Contacts

ACTION ALERT!

On March 25, the Illinois House of Representatives voted 67-47 to adopt House Resolution 60, which calls for a halt on executions while a commission studies all aspects of the administration of the death penalty.

The action comes after revelations of yet another innocent person being sentenced to death in the state. In February, Anthony Porter - who came within 48 hours of being executed last September - became the eighth person to be released from Illinois' death row in the past five years. Shortly after Porter's release, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the conviction of yet another death row prisoner, Steven Smith, finding that the evidence against him was not credible.

House Resolution 60 establishes "an independent, non-partisan Task Force on the Death Penalty," which is mandated to hold public hearings into how the death penalty is currently applied in Illinois and report its findings and recommendations to the legislature within six months. Governor George Ryan is urged to institute a moratorium on executions and the Supreme Court is asked not to set any execution dates at least until the Task Force has issued its report. Finally, the resolution calls on the Senate to pass a similar resolution.

While Resolution 60 does not actually establish a moratorium, it demonstrates the growing strength of the public call to halt executions in Illinois. Representative Coy Pugh (D-Chicago), who introduced the resolution, emphasized that the state's death penalty machinery is riddled by a "culture of misuse of power," underscoring numerous instances of judicial corruption as well as police and prosecutorial misconduct. He and other members of the state's Legislative Black Caucus lobbied heavily for the resolution's passage, joining the Illinois Conference of Churches for a well-covered press conference at the State Capitol on March 24.

Even Republican Governor Ryan, who has actively opposed a moratorium, has conceded that a review of the state's death penalty statute is needed. "I think everybody knows what's at stake here. . . . An innocent man was about to die, and thank God he didn't. And now we want to make sure that scenario doesn't reappear and come back and haunt us in the future," Ryan said recently.

In early April, the Illinois Supreme Court appointed a special commission of 17 judges to study trial and sentencing procedures in death penalty cases.

Throughout the state, people are pushing for a formal moratorium, pointing to deep flaws in the legal system and the Governor-appointed Attorney General's complicity in it.

Illinois voters seem to agree. A recent Chicago Tribune poll of 790 registered voters indicates that while the majority (63%) still favor the death penalty, more than half (54%) believe that there should be a moratorium on executions until all capital cases are thoroughly reviewed. Further, when compared with a similar poll in 1994, the new poll reveals a 13% decline in support and a 7% increase in overall opposition to the death penalty.

The Infamous Illinois Innocence Factor

Increasing discomfort with how the death penalty is being applied is no doubt responsible for this public opinion shift. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, almost as many people have been found innocent and released from Illinois' death row (11) as have been executed (12).

Questions are being raised as to why so many innocent people are ending up on the state's death row. The answers point to a system mired in police and prosecutorial abuses. Further, the vast majority of death row prisoners come from poverty, and 69% are people of color.

Last September, the Supreme Court of Illinois stayed Anthony Porter's impending execution so it could review his mental state. His IQ of 51 no doubt made him especially vulnerable to zealous police and prosecutors. Five months later, while the competency appeal was pending, Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess and his students uncovered evidence that totally exonerated Porter. The Northwestern team located and interviewed key witnesses in the case. As a result, one of these witnesses recanted his original testimony, admitting that the police investigators had pressured him to implicate Porter. Another witness found by the students revealed that her ex-husband, Alstory Smith, was the man who had committed the double murder. Simon admitted to the shooting deaths on video. Released on February 5 after 17 years on death row, a thankful Porter proclaimed, "Thank God, I'm innocent of all charges. Thank God, I'm free."

Porter is not the only innocent death row prisoner owing his life to David Protess and his students. His 1996 journalism class conducted a similar investigation, which led to the release of four prisoners, two of whom were on death row.

And while Governor Ryan has claimed that these discoveries of innocence prove that the system is working, most of those released owe their freedom to people who, like Protess and his students, are totally outside the legal system.

Meanwhile, three former prosecutors and four police officers from Dupage County - including one sitting judge - are currently being tried for conspiracy, felony obstruction of justice and perjury for their involvement in the wrongful capital conviction of Rolando Cruz. Framed for the 1983 rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl, Cruz was released in 1995 after his innocence was revealed.

Nationwide, 78 death row prisoners have been found to be innocent and released since executions resumed in 1977. These defendants spent an average of seven years on death row before their eventual release. The average time between conviction and execution has been eight years. In light of recent state and federal legislation aimed at shortening the time between conviction and execution, in the future the average death row defendant will be executed before his or her innocence is discovered.

ACTION ALERT!

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"This is one of those moments when we, as a community, should lead....The answer to homophobic violence is not more violence, it is education."

With this statement from its executive director, Richard Burns, Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center of New York joined 11 other lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations to proclaim their opposition to the death penalty.

The issue of capital punishment has come to the forefront in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities since Wyoming prosecutor Cal Rerucha announced late last year that he would seek the death penalty for the two men accused of the beating death of gay student Matthew Shepard. In speaking out, the groups underscored their consensus that executing the offender is neither an effective nor just response to homophobic violence.

"As a community we must take every opportunity to speak out against violence, including capital punishment," said Katherine Acey of the Astraea National Lesbian Action Foundation. "Killing a homophobe will not kill homophobia," added Martin Ornales-Quintero of LLEGO, National Latina/o LGBT Organization.

"Human rights are not a euphemism for gay rights," insisted Julie Dorf of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission. "We cannot pick and choose human rights."

Central to the groups' pronouncement were concerns about how the death penalty gets applied. "Lambda deals daily with the legal system's fallibility and the effects of bias on court decisions. With this experience, we oppose the death penalty as a harsh and irreversible use of government power," explained Kevin M. Cathcart of the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund. Kevin McGruder of Gay Men of African added: "The death penalty is applied in an inequitable way and when factors of race, sexual orientation and income are taken into account, there is even more inequity. Mistakes happen and innocent people are sentenced to death. In those circumstances where the sentence has been carried out, the mistake cannot be reversed."

"There are few facets of our criminal justice system more deeply flawed than the death penalty," concluded Kate Kendall of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "Rather than deterring violence or curbing crime, the death penalty instead stands as a most extreme example of the race and class bias which pervades much of our society."

The ACLU Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project and OutFront Minnesota also joined in speaking out against the death penalty.

On April 5, the first defendant in the case, Russell Arthur Henderson, 21, plead guilty and was sentenced to two life sentences. Henderson has insisted that while he was present at the scene, it was Aaron James McKinney, also 21, who beat Shepard. McKinney faces the death penalty in August in what will be Wyoming's first capital trial in 20 years. In a pattern dangerously typical of multi-defendant capital cases, Henderson will likely testify against McKinney in exchange for his life being spared.

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Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun died on March 4, 1999. He may be best known for authoring the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion. Yet, his quarter-century service on the Court was perhaps most distinguished by his willingness to change his mind about another controversial issue: capital punishment. His public evolution revealed a rare humility in the usually lofty Supreme Court.

While surprisingly liberal for a justice appointed by President Richard Nixon, Blackmun dissented in the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, which declared all existing death penalty laws to be unconstitutional and commuted every death sentence in the nation to life. Then in 1976, he cast the fifth vote necessary to uphold a new generation of laws that promised to apply the death penalty consistently and equitably. Never did he join with contemporaries who actively dissented on capital punishment - the late Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Yet throughout his term, Blackmun was increasingly troubled by the Court's deregulation of death row appeals and the quickening pace of executions that resulted. In a stinging dissent in Herrera v. Collins (1993) - where the Court held it was constitutional to execute a prisoner despite substantial, though last-minute, claims of innocence - the Justice concluded that the death penalty was becoming "perilously close to simple murder."

A year later, in Callins v. Collins, his arguments that capital punishment was unconstitutional would fuel the growing movement to end executions in the United States:

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored - indeed, I have struggled, along with the majority of this court - to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."

Foreshadowing concerns that the American Bar Association would raise four years later in its call for an immediate halt on executions, he challenged his fellow jurists and the public to see the unconstitutionality of the death penalty's application:

"Even under the most sophisticated death penalty statutes, race continues to play a major role in determining who shall live and who shall die. Perhaps it should not be surprising that the biases and prejudices that infect society generally would influence the determination of who is sentenced to death, even within the narrower pool of death-eligible defendants selected according to objective standards."

He went on to conclude that such unfairness was ultimately unfixable:

"It seems that the decision whether a human being should live or die is so inherently subjective, rife with all life's understandings, experiences, prejudices and passions, that it inevitably defies the rationality and consistency required by the Constitution."

Blackmun's legacy is much more than the sum of his legal arguments. It is an impassioned call to conscience, a challenge to our society's deeply embedded assumptions and mores about violence and punishment. He reminds us that the death penalty is a complicated issue and cannot be settled by the simple terms of "for" or "against." Rather, it is essential that the public gain wider understanding of the mechanisms of the justice system, how it works and how it fails. He leaves a flicker of hope to those committed to such education:

"I am more optimistic, though, that this Court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness 'in the infliction of (death) is so plainly doomed to failure that it and the death penalty must be abandoned altogether' (Godfrey v. Georgia, 1980. . . .). I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that it will eventually arrive."

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Moratorium is needed on the death penalty

To the Editor:

The American Bar Association rightly diagnosed that there had to be something radically wrong when so many prisoners on death row are found innocent after many years of being incarcerated.

The ABA requested a national moratorium "unless and until greater fairness and due process prevail in death penalty implementation" (Report in support of American Bar Association Resolution, 1997)

There is now a concerted effort to follow in the footsteps of the ABA's moratorium by concerned organizations, churches and governments to pass resolutions for a national moratorium and have at least 2,000 such resolutions passed by the year 2000.

Community United Church of Christ, Champaign, did just that. Their ad hoc committee on the death penalty, following months of available documented information, studies on the subject, and sermons, presented the congregation with a resolution at their annual meeting in January 1999. It passed with an overwhelming vote. This is in keeping with the mission of the church as a just peace church.

The resolution will not collect dust in some file folder. Copies will be sent to President Clinton, Gov. Ryan and other elected officials. It will support the passage of the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ's proposed resolution at their 1999 Annual Meeting. Also, copies will be made available to all UCC churches at their Association Meetings this year.

Innocent death row prisoners, the mentally retarded and youth cannot be allowed to be executed in this country in any state. We must act now and quickly.

Frieda I. Wascher
Urbana, IL

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From the Death Penalty Information Center's website (www.essential.org/dpic).

The Massachusetss House of Representatives has stornlgy turned back a proposal to reinstate the death penalty by a vote of 80-73. The vote represented an erosion of support for capital punishment. Fifteen months ago, a similar bill failed on a tie vote.

One of the chief concerns expressed by legislators was the danger of executing an innocent person. (Boston Globe, 3/30/99). Among those opposing the death penalty thsi year was Kathy Callahan. eighteen months ago she had led a petition drive to restore the death penalty. But now she has changed her mind: "Given human nature, I don't think there should be a death penalty." (Boston Herald, 3/30/99).

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by Michael A. Kroll

The verdict in Jasper, Texas, holding John William King guilty of the gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr. is like some of President Clinton's statements - literally true, but incomplete and misleading. A true verdict would have found all of us bear some responsibility for Byrd's violent death.

King, 24, emerged from prison in July 1997 after spending two years of an eight-year sentence for a nonviolent crime. Involved in a burglary at 17, he spent two months in a "boot camp" and was put on parole. Repeated violations of parole brought him before a judge who sentenced him to eight years in Beto One, a "tough" prison.

The violence done to and by King behind prison walls in those two years did not concern the rest of us. As long as the virus of racial violence is confined to "them," no one outside knows or cares to know what every prisoner in America knows - prisons are raging cauldrons of violence, both systematic and random. Violence that prisoners survive primarily through racial identification.

"In prison, the only protection you have is your race," said Dwight E. Abbott, recently released from Folsom Prison, where he was a member of a prominent white gang. " All free-world prejudices become obvious and intense inside because of the necessity of survival. Only your own will protect you, and there's safety in numbers."

Abbott, as repulsed by James Byrd's brutal death as anyone, knows the rage that sparked John William King's vicious violence. Unlike us, however, he is not surprised that a convict emerges from prison and acts out of emotions based on his prison conditioning. That conditioning starts early. An African American, now a ward of the California Prison Authority, described his first day: "When you get there, you go to your own race and they run down what you have to do."

Identification-by-face is the fuel for the fires of rage. It is only when the consequences of that combination spill over into the "free world" - as in Jasper - that is registers with a "shocked" public which has, through its silence, given prison administrators virtual carte blanche to promote and exploit the very violence the prison is purportedly designed to protect us from.

"There is no way out of this dilemma," said Abbott, "until the public demands a change. There is no cure within the system. They use racial violence to justify building more prisons. There is not internal incentive to change."

Abbott, who has spent 38 of his 56 years behind bars, remembers a time when the public did care. About 30 years ago, programs existed - both within the system, designed to mitigate the attitudes and deficiencies that lead to prison, and outside, to provide a transition to self-sufficiency: job training, housing, some decent clothes.

Parole, once designed to provide these essential services, is now best characterized by a sign on the door of a Colorado parole agency: "We trail 'em; we nail 'em; we jail 'em."

"Just deciding to be a good citizen isn't enough," Abbott said. "Without assistance, convicts must turn to the same people they turned to in prison. Even trying to put their best foot forward, they're marked as prisoners."

Jasper County prosecutor Pat Hardy condemned King for defying "God and Christianity and everything most people in this country stand for." But the founder of the Christian faith did not turn his back on the captives of his day. One must ask, what is it that we stand for?

"Society and its prison instruments made Jasper, Texas," Abbott concluded. "That's prison rage expressing itself. This wasn't the first time, and it won't be the last. Society doesn't want to face it, but as long as we continue to rely on the violent instruments of the modern American prison, we're in for a lot of trouble."

Michael A. Kroll, a former director of the Death Penalty Information Center, writes for Pacific News Service.

Reprinted from the Oakland Tribune (CA), March 1, 1999

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Illinois

IL Death Penalty Moratorium Committee
180 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 2300
Chicago, IL 60601
312-849-2279; 312-201-9760 (fax)
icadp@keynet.com
Aviva Futorian, 773-348-3899
Janet Kittlaus, 847-864-7849
Bill Ryan, 708-531-9923

Nancy Tegtmeir
Illinois Conference of Churches - Moratorium Committee
615 South Fifth St.
Springfield, IL 62703
217-544-3423
iccnrt@juno.com

Jorge Sanchez
Amnesty International, Midwest Region
53 West Jackson Blvd., Suite 1162
Chicago, IL 60604
312-435-6395
jsanchez@aiusa.org

Maryland

Lorig Charkoudian
MD CASE (Coalition Against State Executions)
P.O. Box 39205
Baltimore, MD 21212
410-243-8020
www.mdcase.org
info@mdcase.org

New York

Sue Porter
Reconciliation Network - Don't Kill in My Name
121 N. Fitzhugh St.
Rochester, NY 14614
716-325-7727
judprocom@juno.com

North Carolina

Steve Dear
People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
157-1/2 E. Franklin St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
919-933-7567; 919-933-6868 (fax)
www.netpath.net/~ucch/pfadp
sjdear1@aol.com

Pennsylvania

Jeff Garris
Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty
P.O. Box 58128
Philadelphia, PA 19102
215-387-6555; 215-769-5408

Joan Anderson
Central Pennsylvanians to Abolish the Death Penalty
P.O. Box 4415
Harrisburg, PA 17111-0415
717-232-1943

Texas

Mary Robinson
Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty,
Huntsville Chapter/Moratorium Now!
Rt. 1 Box 665
Point Blank, TX 77364
409-377-5112
maryfran@lcc.net

International

Magdaleno Rose-Avila
Moratorium 2000
8306 Mills Dr., #607
Miami, FL 33183
305-596-7293; 305-279-4679 (fax)

Alberta Rocca
Hands Off Cain
866 United Nations Plaza, #408
New York, NY 10017
212-813-1334
www.handsoffcain.org
handsoffcain@prodigy.net

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In Illinois:

Tell Governor Ryan to impose a formal moratorium on executions in Illinois, at least until the results of the House study are presented in six months:

Governor George Ryan
207 State Capitol Building,
Springfield, IL 62706
tel: (217) 782-0244
fax: (217) 524-4049
governor@gov084.1.state.il.us

In Pennsylvania:

Rally for Death Penalty Moratorium

State Capitol - Harrisburg, PA

Saturday, May 1, 1999, from noon to 3 p.m.

Featuring:

Father Daniel Berrigan, author & activist
Ernie Preate, former Attorney General of PA
Shane Creamer, former Attorney General of PA

Non-Violent Civil Disobedience

After the rally, walk to the Governor's mansion culminates in non-violent action. (Persons doing civil disobedience must take part in non-violence training prior to action.)

Organized by PA Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty at (215) 387-6555

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