By: Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
Darby Tillis should have been dead by now. So should have Anthony Porter. And Gary Gauger.
All three men were convicted in the state of Illinois of murder and sentenced to die in its electric chair. If they had been put to death soon after their convictions, some would have trumpeted their executions as proof of the proper workings of the criminal justice system.
Fortunately, these men found tenacious legal help which proved that their convictions were wrong-that they were innocent of the charges against them. In recent years, after spending up to 19 years on Illinois' Death Row, they were freed.
According to a March 11 Washington Post story, the three were among the participants at a conference of death-penalty opponents who gathered at Chicago's DePaul University last weekend to discuss what comes next in the nationwide effort to abolish the death penalty in Illinois and the 37 other states which now have it.
The National Urban League has always opposed the death penalty. We believe it is morally wrong, and that its practice has been irredeemably tainted with racial and class bias. We oppose it for every inmate on the death rows of America's prisons, not just the ones who, like these men, are innocent of the crimes for which they've been convicted.
But there's no doubt that the successes during the past decade of anti-death penalty advocates in using evidence, including DNA evidence, to prove the innocence of more than one hundred death-row inmates across the country has blunted popular support for this most extreme of punishments.
These cases have helped to throw a harsh light on some egregious flaws of our criminal justice system: Defendants, who are most often poor, being saddled with incompetent or uncaring or just overworked attorneys who can't provide adequate legal representation. Evidence being handled carelessly by police lab technicians-or mishandled by police and prosecutors in such ways as to raise suspicions of deliberate misconduct. Judicial rulings which improperly favor the prosecution and in some cases push the jury toward sentencing the defendant to death.
As Rob Warden, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School, remarked last year to the New York Times, "When we see the vast numbers of errors that occur in these relatively few DNA cases, what does that say about the rest of the system?
" We can only wonder," Professor Warden continued, "about how many innocent people we've executed and how many hundreds, thousands of people are languishing in prison for crimes they did not commit."
These words, and the cases behind them, underscore the growing alarm about just how widespread are the flawed criminal justice procedures which produced these unjust sentences.
Illinois Republican Governor, George Ryan, who was at the DePaul conference, has been in the forefront of the governmental reconsideration of the death penalty-in part because the examination of death-penalty cases there by advocates of abolition and newspapers has produced stark examples of injustice.
Two years ago Gov. Ryan declared an indefinite moratorium on executions in the state after DNA testing proved 13 death-row inmates were innocent of their accused crimes. (Since it re-established the death penalty in 1977 Illinois has executed 12 men.) For most of the men, the testing came years after the initial date for their executions.
That moratorium remains in effect while a special 14-member commission he appointed readies its report on the death penalty, which is due this spring.
But even as he awaits that study, Gov. Ryan, who leaves office next January, said earlier this month that he'd review the cases of all 159 inmates on death row in Illinois, and suggested that he might commute some or all of the sentences to life in prison.
Meanwhile, bills seeking to impose moratoria on executions have been filed in 21 states; a growing consensus is forming to bar execution of those found to be mentally deficient; and last year in Illinois, which may be the bellwether state as far as repealing the death penalty goes, a bill was filed to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Studies have shown conclusively that when jurors are given the option of considering life without the possibility of parole as a sentence, they are less likely to hand up a death sentence.
All these developments may be the harbinger of a turn away, again, from the death penalty, a recognition that our justifiable anger against those who commit murder and threaten the safety of all law-abiding citizens should not become a rationale for tolerating practices which are themselves unjust.
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