IL Officially Shuts Down Death Row

After years of stories of men sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit and families of murder victims angrily demanding their loved ones' killers pay with their own lives, the end of the death penalty in Illinois came quietly Friday when the bill banning executions took effect.

That bill was signed with much fanfare in March by Gov. Pat Quinn, who subsequently commuted the sentences of the 15 men on death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Fourteen of those prisoners have been placed in maximum security prisons around the state, while one was placed in a medium-high security prison with a mental health facility.


Ironically, the state's death row at the prison in Pontiac has been turned into a place where inmates go once they are deemed worthy of leaving the state's super-maximum Tamms prison in southern Illinois and enter a less-restrictive prison program, a corrections department official said.

As for the death chamber itself, last used in 1999, Stacey Solano, a spokeswoman for the state's department of corrections, said no decision has been made about what, if anything, will be done with it.
Because the fate of executions in the state was sealed in March when Quinn signed the bill abolishing it, Friday's ultimate end to the death penalty was barely noted around the state. Solano said the department has received just two calls for information from the media on Friday.
That lack of interest stands in contrast to the last dozen years or so when Illinois was at the very center of the national and international debate over the death penalty. Even before the day then-Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in 2000 to the day in 2003 when he commuted to life in prison the death sentences of more than 160 inmates, the spotlight on capital punishment has shined brightest on Illinois.
In Illinois, where 12 men were executed between 1977 when the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court and the year before Ryan's 2000 moratorium, the issue never went away. Even as lawmakers debated the death penalty and the moratorium Ryan imposed remained in place, prosecutors continued to seek the death penalty. By the time Quinn signed the bill in March, there were 15 men on death row.

Former Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine, a proponent of the death penalty and a vocal critic of Ryan's decision to clear death row, said "I believe there are some people who do such terrible things that they forfeit their right to be among us."

Devine also said he doesn't believe the death penalty is necessarily gone forever in Illinois, and that the debate will begin anew when there is a particularly horrific crime.

"I suspect when the next John Wayne Gacy, Timothy McVeigh.... happens there will be some discussion of bringing it back," he said. "Nothing is carved in stone."
Serial killer Gacy, who prowled the Chicago streets preying on lonely runaways and murdered 33 young men and boys, was executed in 1994. McVeigh was convicted of murder n the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing that killed 168 people and executed in 2001.

Source: Associate Press