Judge sets July 30 for Tenney execution

A DuPage County judge set a July 30th execution date Monday for a long-imprisoned killer who fatally shot a young Aurora father during a robbery that netted just $6.

Edward Tenney joins 15 other condemned men awaiting death by lethal injection on Illinois' death row despite an unofficial moratorium.

Tenney faces an estimated decade of appeals. Still, Circuit Judge Daniel Guerin is required by law to set the perfunctory July 30th execution - which marks Tenney's 51st birthday. Guerin also denied a request for a new trial.

On Feb. 24, a jury convicted Tenney of killing Jerry Weber on April 16, 1992. Tenney robbed the 24-year-old man of a wallet containing $6, as Weber tried to free his van from the mud, three weeks after his second son's birth.

It was the first of the three murders that Tenney committed. He already is serving life prison terms for the 1993 murders of Virginia Johannessen, 75, and dairy heiress Mary Jill Oberweis, 56. The widows were killed in separate home invasions in the same affluent Aurora Township neighborhood in Kane County.

Both were shot. Johannessen also was beaten with a hammer when the bullet didn't kill her.

Gov. Pat Quinn has declined to lift the moratorium, as had Rod Blagojevich before him. Quinn's Republican opponent, Sen. Bill Brady, said he supports the death penalty and will lift the moratorium if elected.

If so, Anthony Mertz is first in line. Mertz killed Eastern Illinois University student Shannon McNamara, of Rolling Meadows, in 2001. Mertz continues to exhaust his appeals and likely has at least three more years before his execution.

Former Gov. George Ryan characterized Illinois' as a broken system and enacted a 2000 moratorium on executions after 13 men on death row were exonerated. Ryan also commuted the sentences of 167 condemned inmates to life in prison.

Several reforms followed, as the exonerations continued. To date, 20 death penalty inmates have been cleared in Illinois since 1977, when capital punishment was reinstated. Attempts to abolish the death penalty haven't advanced far in Springfield, but there has been a dramatic shift in how often death sentences are given.

Before the moratorium, experts say, 12 to 20 death sentences were imposed each year here. That number dropped to fewer than four annually, similar to a national trend in which death sentences are down more than 60 percent since 1999 and the number of executions have been halved.

In Tenney's case, the jury deliberated less than three hours before returning to the courtroom March 9 with its verdict supporting the death penalty.

Illinois has not executed an inmate since Andrew Kokoraleis, who died by lethal injection in March 1999. Kokoraleis and three members of his so-called Ripper Crew were responsible for the sex slayings of up to 21 women in Cook and DuPage in the early 1980s. The others remain in prison.