I am against capital punishment, but do not think a governor should effectively legislate from the executive as did Illinois Governor George Ryan on his way out the door. Why did he not fight to change the law while in office?
He did. It was an ongoing issue, though he was busy screwing up in many other areas of the job. (Hell, he's a republican, I can go ahead and say that.)
Besides, it is within the power of the office of the governor of Illinois to commute sentences (or whatever ya call it). The people of Illinois can push to change that if they see fit, but I think it would be a hotly contested battle to take this power away from the office.
One of the basic claims of the state as a form of social organization is that all applications of physical violence are reserved for the state. That is why you can not "duke it out" in the streets but must take your dispute before a judge. The death penalty is the most extreme form of that claim and applied mainly to make the point that certain kinds of behavior are impermissible up to and including threatening the integrity and stability of public order or of the state as an institution. I think opposition to the death penalty is ultimately useless because under duress it is going to be used regardless of public opinion. Rather it should be severely limited by law and those who apply it should be forced to justify their application before a court with appropriate legal penalities if it turns out they were wrong.
I believe in the death penalty,; but, as is, it is badly and wrongly applied. The first problem in America vis a vis criminal justice is that drugs are not crimes, they are social and physical ills.
Major reform is necessary IMHO!
patiodog wrote:Besides, it is within the power of the office of the governor of Illinois to commute sentences (or whatever ya call it). The people of Illinois can push to change that if they see fit, but I think it would be a hotly contested battle to take this power away from the office.
I don't dispute the need to allow him to do so on a case-by-case basis, I dispute the rectitude of his use of that power to commute all existing death penalty cases without regard to the merits of each case. Just my opinion...
If I hadn't lived there when a number of convictions were reviewed and overturned, I might have some qualms about his decision, even though I oppose the death penalty largely on the grounds that it is, once executed (no pun intended), irreversible. However, it seems to me that there is a very good reason to suspect that the system there is fundamentally flawed, and that Ryan may really have seen it, in addition to securing some sort of legacy for himself, as his responsibility to use whatever means he could to ensure that the state not put to death anyone not guilty of the crime for which they were sentenced.
On the flip side of that, though, I think the fact that these sentences are now life in prison instead of death makes it less likely that they will receive any kind of review whatsoever, and anybody who was wrongfully convicted might spend the rest of their (now longer) lives in prison where on death row they might have received a great deal of assistance with their appeal.
Anyway, politics and public works and services in Illinois struck me as inherently crooked, and I'm inclined to look suspiciously at any major decision made there. Just my impression, though.
Patio - Good comments. Thanks.
Patio, your impression may be argued to be a poor basis for a judgment, but i would like to point out that a political machine has run Chicago for more than 130 years, and the King James I was the gov for 18 years--time and more to have allowed the rot to set in. I was for many years a resident of that state. By and large, the citizenry out of range of the smell of Lake Michigan are a good lot, and those in Cook County are not that bad, although every politician--Republican or Democrat--in the Windy City could be taken out and hung in place of the death row inmates, and the state would be better off. I'd lived many years in the South, but never encountered such bred-in-the-bone racism, nor so virulent a form as i encountered in Chicago. There has always been a huge divide between the largely, successfully agrarian, Anglo-German, Republican central and northern-outside-of-Chicago nothern portions of the state and the hard-scrabble farming, oil-natural-gas-coal-mining southern counties, poor as dirt, descended from southerners and therefore traditionally democrat and allied to the Chicago Democratic machine. Senator Paul Simon redeemed southern Illinois from the Reagan Democrat disaster which eventually turned the rest of the South Republican. Nonetheless, business as usual in politics and governance has always been "i got mine, screw you."
