On November 19, 2003, ten months after Governor George H. Ryan exercised his clemency and pardon power to empty the Illinois death row, the nation’s eighth largest, of its 171 prisoners, the state House of Representatives unanimously approved what the Chicago Tribune aptly described as “a historic reform of death penalty procedures in a state embarrassed by its penchant for choosing the wrong people to die.”
The bill, known as SB 472, which unanimously passed the Senate on November 5, contains more than 20 measures designed to respond to the state’s troubling history of wrongful convictions, particularly in capital cases. The House action means that SB 472 immediately became law because it was an override of Governor Rod Blagojevich’s amendatory veto of the bill five months earlier. Blagojevich had objected to a provision of the bill relating to the procedure for firing police officers found to have committed perjury. The issue was addressed to the governor’s satisfaction in a trailer bill, HB 576, also approved by both chambers of the General Assembly.
After the House vote, Blagojevich announced he would continue the moratorium on executions that Governor Ryan ordered in January 2000. “We have to now see how these reforms work,” Blagojevich said, although it can safely be predicted that the measures will reduce, but not eliminate, wrongful convictions stemming from flaws in the criminal justice system.
SB 472 is one of two major criminal justice reform bills approved during the 2003 session of the General Assembly. The other bill was signed by Blagojevich on July 17. Known as HB 223 in the House and SB 15 in the Senate, that bill made Illinois the first state to require electronic recording of custodial interrogations (although two other states — Minnesota and Alaska — have used the procedure under court order since the mid-1980s). HB 223/SB 15 was approved by the House by a vote of 107 to 7 on May 27, 2003, following unanimous approval in the Senate on April 3, 2003.
The reforms implemented to date make substantial improvements, but fail to address some of the major flaws in the system, including arbitrary capital sentencing practices. According to the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment, defendants are five times more likely to be sentenced to death in downstate counties than Cook, and defendants in cases with white victims are three and a half times more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants in cases with minority victims. Such arbitrariness owes in part to overbroad eligibility factors and lack of statewide oversight of death penalty prosecutions, both problems which are essentially unchanged by the new law.
In addition to arbitrariness in death-sentencing, the legislature in 2004 will need to address problems including forensic science reform and implementation of more accurate eyewitness line-up procedures.
Detailed summary of the reforms
The Illinois Reform Bill: What it Does and What it Does Not Do
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Summary of death penalty reform package Governor's veto of decertification provision |
Summary of interrogations bill Full text of interrogations bill |
