Capital punishment in Illinois is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken, a Tribune ›nvestigation has foundÖ[Many defendants] have been condemned to die in trials so rife with error that nearly half of the state’s death-penalty cases have been reversed on appeal. The findings reveal a system so plagued by unprofessionalism, imprecision and bias that they have rendered the state’s ultimate form of punishment its least credible.
• At least 33 times, a defendant sentenced to die was represented at trial by an attorney who has been disbarred or suspended—sanctions reserved for conduct so incompetent, unethical or even criminal the lawyer’s license is taken away.
• In at least 46 cases where a defendant was sentenced to die, the prosecution’s evidence included a jailhouse informant—a form of evidence so historically unreliable that some states have begun warning jurors to treat it with special skepticism.
• In at least 20 cases where a defendant was sentenced to die, the prosecution’s case included a crime lab employee’s visual comparison of hairs—a type of forensic evidence that dates to the 19th century and has proved so notoriously unreliable that its use is now restricted or even barred in some jurisdictions outside Illinois.
• At least 35 times, a defendant sent to death row was black and the jury that determined guilt or sentence all white—a racial composition that prosecutors consider such an advantage that they have removed as many as 20 African-Americans from a single trial’s jury pool to achieve it. The U.S. Constitution forbids racial discrimination during jury selection, but courts have enforced that prohibition haltingly.
• Forty percent of Illinois’ death-penalty cases are characterized by at least one of the above elements. Sometimes, all of the elements appear in a single case. Dennis Williams, who is black, was sentenced to die by an all-white Cook County jury; prosecuted with evidence that included a jailhouse informant and hair comparison; and defended, none too well, by an attorney who was later disbarred.
Williams and three other men—referred to as the Ford Heights Four—were wrongly convicted of the 1978 murders of a south suburban couple. Williams served 18 years, almost all on death row, before he was cleared by DNA evidence in 1996. He then filed a lawsuit accusing sheriff’s officers of framing him. ‘The feeling is emotionally choking,’ Williams said of being sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit. ‘It’s inhuman. It’s something that shouldn’t be imaginable. Here are people who are supposed to uphold the law who are breaking it.’ In securing a death sentence against Verneal Jimerson, another one of the Ford Heights Four who was exonerated by DNA evidence, prosecutors allowed their star witness to tell what they knew to be a lie, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled. Jimerson, according to a previous Tribune investigation, is one of at least 381 defendants nationwide to have a homicide conviction thrown out because prosecutors concealed evidence suggesting innocence or knowingly used false evidence. That total underscores how questionable tactics marring Illinois death-penalty trials also course through other cases and states.1
The challenge for anti-death penalty activists is how to use Ryan’s moratorium as a stepping-stone to abolish the Illinois death penalty altogether.
In the wake of the moratorium decision, Ryan convened a 14-member panel to investigate the death penalty system. The panel does include some like Cook County public defender Rita Fry who supports abolition. But in the main, it is made up of people who want to do nothing more than reform Illinois’ death penalty procedures. One of the panelists, Thomas Needham, is a former prosecutor and currently the Chief of Staff for Chicago Police Superintendent Terry Hillard. In August 1998, Needham personally closed the investigation into the torture of Stanley Howard, one of the Death Row 10—even though the Office of Professional Standards (OPS) substantiated Howard’s allegations of torture. The panel does not include any former death row inmates or representatives from civil or human rights organizations.
Only a movement can force Ryan’s commission to conclude what Ryan wants to conceal—that the death penalty system cannot be “fixed.” The climate for building such a movement has not been better in decades. Among registered Illinois voters, support for the death penalty has fallen from 76 percent in 1994, to 63 percent a year ago, to 58 percent today. And in Cook County—a largely urban county that includes Chicago—only 45 percent of voters support the death penalty. To win abolition in Illinois, we need to look to the strategy that won the moratorium in the first place—building a vocal and very public movement that keeps death penalty proponents on the defensive.
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