Time for state to join civilized world and end death penalty

Eight men and four women deliberated less than 90 minutes Wednesday before telling 31-year-old Eric Hanson of Naperville that he must die for murdering four members of his family.

"Truth can be very stubborn," prosecutor Michael Wolfe tells jurors during his argument asking for the ultimate penalty.

But the truth about the death penalty in Illinois has been blowing in the political winds for the eight years since Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executing prisoners. Until and unless another governor lifts the moratorium, Illinois has a death penalty that sends inmates to death row but won't actually put anyone to death.

"It's not fair to have a moratorium," says DuPage County State's Attorney Joseph Birkett, who made that call to seek death for Hanson. "The moratorium is confusing and it's wrong. You either have a death penalty or you don't."

And Illinois shouldn't have a death penalty. It should join the rest of the civilized world, abolish the death penalty and have no need for a frustrating moratorium.

"It's a simple thing to say, 'Well, this moratorium is frustrating.' But it's there for a reason," says Jane Bohman, executive director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "The reason we have a moratorium is that prosecutors convicted and sent to death row at least 18 innocent people."

Oh yeah, that.

Even if we perfect the system so that we only kill the guilty ones -- and Hanson, even in his interview with Daily Herald reporter Christy Gutowski, seems guilty -- the death penalty process is a flawed and often arbitrary system.

Just this month, a downstate Belleville jury heard the horrific story of a man named Jason Smith who used a shotgun to kill his ex-girlfriend, his infant son and two people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Smith gunned down four people, including the baby, Jason Smith Jr. Grieving family members called for his execution.

The jury opted to give Smith life in prison instead of the death penalty.

After watching the chilling confession of Juan Luna, convicted of massacring seven people and cold-bloodedly slitting one woman's throat in the Palatine Brown's Chicken murders, a Cook County jury chose to spare Luna from a death sentence.

"The number of death sentences is down 80 percent since the mid-90s when the death penalty was at its heyday because judges and juries are aware of the ongoing flaws in the Illinois death penalty system," Bohman suggests.

We used to get 15 to 18 death sentences a year, Bohman says. Hanson is the 14th killer to get a death sentence since the moratorium went into effect in 2000.

"With the day-to-day rejection of the death penalty in Illinois, the people are speaking their mind on the value of the death penalty in Illinois," Bohman says.

The decline in death penalty convictions "is a good thing," Birkett says. "The death penalty should be used rarely."

While noting that Gov. Rod Blagojevich stripped funding to research the death penalty, Birkett, who has helped write some of the legal improvements, says Illinois can have a fair and just death penalty -- even if it seems haphazard and arbitrary to those of us who compare the range of murder sentences handed down by juries across the state.

"Every individual, every jury, every community is unique," Birkett says.

And every death penalty handed down is dependent on the quirks of that individual, that jury and that community. If Hanson had killed his family in Cook County or downstate, he might have been sentenced to life in prison, as were Luna and Smith. What's the harm of that to the citizens of Illinois?

"It's clear that even in the most serious cases, the Illinois criminal justice system can function without the death penalty," Bohman says. "It's clear it's not necessary."

The death penalty is used too often, costs taxpayers far more, takes too long to impose, may still have problems with racial and geographic discrimination, might still be prone to errors, and can't justify its purpose, which seems to be "state-sponsored retribution," concludes a recent Illinois Bar Journal article by Thomas P. Sullivan, co-chair of the Illinois Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment.

That's why most of the civilized world has abolished the death penalty. In Illinois, the politicians simply called a death penalty timeout, but they still make jurors continue to play the life-and-death game.

Hanson must die. Smith and Luna must live.

Jennifer Williams lost her mother and father, her sister and her brother-in-law, and now sees her brother sentenced to death for those murders. Penny Hestad lost her brother. They issued a statement on behalf of all the families touched by this tragedy: "There are no winners at the end of this process, only great losses for Eric, the Hansons, Stutelburgs and Tsao families."

The people of Illinois aren't winning this death penalty battle either. That truth really is stubborn.