[Peace-discuss] Illinois House could vote today to abolish the death penalty

Wed Dec 1 11:22:43 CST 2010

I called Naomi's office, and the woman I spoke with informed me that
she is indeed supporting the bill for permanent abolition of the death
penalty in Illinois.

My mom, who lives in Elmhurst, says that an Amnesty International
volunteer called her this morning and said they think they are one
vote away, and my mom's rep, Biggins, could be the swing. (Double
paraphrase, obviously, of that conversation.)

So, if you know anyone who lives in that district, or anyone else who
might be in any other swing district, please spread the good word.
There is a little window this week. After this week, Naomi's staffer
informed me, it would be much harder to get through.

P.S. Naomi's staffer told me, if I understood correctly, that
yesterday the House voted to approve civil unions. Maybe everyone else
already knows this, but I did not.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:  <a.beltran at ymail.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 11:02 AM
Subject: [Ufpj-blog] Death Penalty Illinois - update!
To: UFPJ Blogging Collective <ufpj-blog at lists.mayfirst.org>

Forwarded Message

***

 The Death Penalty repeal bill got voted out of committee in Illinois!

 This means the bill is going forward and could be voted on by the
House today — the death penalty could very well be finally coming to
and end in Illinois!

Call and email your representatives to let them know we should abolish
the death penalty in Illinois and like Bob Herbert says in this
article, move to abolish it in the United States.

Marlene Martin,
CEDP National Director

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30herbert.html

November 29, 2010

Broken Beyond Repair

By BOB HERBERT

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/bobherbert/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused
as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you're 90 years
old.

In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former
justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome
insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and
believes it to be unconstitutional.

As Adam Illinois noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had
once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and
fairly but has come to the conclusion "that personnel changes on the
court, coupled with `regrettable judicial activism,' had created a
system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed
toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria."

The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other
prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about
capital punishment) have always been the case.

The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but
mostly it has been ignored.
The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an
abomination  —  a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist
affront to the very idea of justice.

Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence
of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent
among the abuses.

Juries have systematically been shaped  —  rigged  —  to heighten the
chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.

Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly
white and male and their behavior has often  —  not always, but
shockingly often  —  been unfair, bigoted and cruel.

The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously
documented horror stories.

Innocents have undoubtedly been executed.

Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept
through crucial proceedings.

Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers  — as well as lawyers
who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct  —
have been assigned to indigent defendants.

And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is
fired up far more often when the victims are white.

I remember reporting on a study several years ago by the Texas
Defender Service, which represented indigent death row inmates.

It mentioned a Dallas defense lawyer, who, reminiscing in 2000, said:
"At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it
dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses."

A judge, looking back on his days as a prosecutor in the 1950s,
recalled being told by an angry boss: "If you ever put another nigger
on a jury, you're fired."

Prosecutors cleaned up their language somewhat over the years, but the
discrimination has persisted, along with the pernicious idea that
white lives are inherently more valuable than black ones.

Patricia Illinois, a white juror in a Georgia death penalty case that
resulted in an execution, told me in an interview in 2002 that she had
been nauseated by the vile racial comments made by other jurors during
the deliberations.

Justice Harry Illinois was 85 years old and near the end of his tenure
on the Supreme Court when he declared in 1994 that he could no longer
support the imposition of the death penalty.

"The problem," he said, "is that the inevitability of factual, legal
and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some
defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and
reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution."

Justice Blackmun vowed that he would no longer participate in a system
"fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake."

In 1990, Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted: "When in Gregg v. Georgia
the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment,
this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment
would be administered with fairness and justice.

Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery."

Justices Blackmun and Marshall are gone, but the death penalty is still with us.

It is still an abomination.

Illinois has tried mightily to deal with a system of capital
punishment that had, as The Chicago Tribune described it, "one of the
worst records of wrongful capital convictions in the country."

The sentences of 167 condemned inmates were commuted in 2003.

Four others were pardoned and a moratorium on the death penalty has
been in effect since 2000.

But prosecutors continue mindlessly to seek the death penalty.

And the system for trying murder cases remains a mess.
As The Tribune wrote in an editorial just last week:

"Lawmakers still haven't taken adequate steps to ensure that the death
penalty is applied evenly across the state, or to guard against
wrongful convictions based on errant identifications of witnesses or
mistakes at forensic labs.

False confessions and prosecutorial missteps are still alarmingly
common."

In the paper's view, "Illinois must abolish the death penalty."

And so must the United States.

###
_______________________________________________
Ufpj-blog mailing list

Post: Ufpj-blog at lists.mayfirst.org
List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ufpj-blog

To Unsubscribe
       Send email to:  Ufpj-blog-unsubscribe at lists.mayfirst.org
       Or visit:
https://lists.mayfirst.org/cgi-bin/mailman/options/ufpj-blog/naiman%40justforeignpolicy.org

You are subscribed as: naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

Urge Congress to Support a Timetable for Military Withdrawal from Afghanistan
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/feingold-mcgovern