It’s not very often that someone in government does something extraordinary. Gov. George Ryan of Illinois has. A week ago tomorrow, Ryan, the outgoing republican governor, commuted the death sentences of all 156 prisoners waiting to be executed on the state’s death row.
The commutations came after a four-year stretch that began when journalism students at Northwestern University began looking at death row cases. Soon after, with the help of DNA technology, men who had been condemned to die for almost a decade were suddenly freed. One man was only two days away from being executed when his innocence was proved.
Ryan’s own investigations, carried out by a blue-ribbon panel he appointed to do a multi-year study, turned up other chilling statistics. The condemned were overwhelmingly minorities, often poor. The death penalty is five times more likely to be administered in the rural areas of Illinois than in Cook County, which contains the city of Chicago. Of the 156 men on death row, 17 were found to be totally innocent, either because of DNA testing or proof that their confessions were beaten out of them in the police’s zeal to find someone, anyone, to clear up a homicide investigation. Others were condemned when their lawyers, often underpaid public defenders, were incompetent and did not put up a vigorous defense.
Regardless of personal feelings about the death penalty, everyone should see that the system is broken and in need of either repair or abolition. The death penalty is irreversible: once it’s been administered, there is no pardon, no reprieve. If America is to have a death penalty, it has to be one that is administered only to those who, without a shadow of a doubt and with no room for human error, are guilty.
A nationwide moratorium on the death penalty is in order at this moment, to examine how to proceed with what is the most awesome and horrifying power of government — the sanctioned killing of its own citizens. The justice system must clear up all the problems with overzealous police or incompetent defenders or mistakes in technology or whatever the cause may be, and if they cannot be cleared up, to abolish the penalty altogether. It is time for all the other governors in states that allow the death penalty, as well as the Department of Justice, to think about the issue and look at the executions that have been carried out and those still pending.
But in a larger, more cosmic sense, philosophers say that even then, there can be no justice with the death penalty. Justice is more than just retribution, or “lex talonis;” it must have some way of recompensing the family of the victim. Putting a murderer to death may fulfill a need for vengeance, but it will not return the murdered; it cannot provide closure or recompense — or real justice.