Illinois Governor Commutes All Death Sentences

Hi pd!

I have an OK perspective, but probably not as good as I should. The main thing that occurs to me as an "insider" is to be suspect of Ryan's motivations, as has been alluded to, since he had a really scandal-ridden term. That's separate from whether he did a good thing or not, though -- it could have been done for iffy reasons while still being a good thing to do.

I want to finish Turow's article in the New Yorker and get back to this. (About being a member of the IL death penalty committee assembled by Ryan.)

Yeah, motivations are murky. And it's kinda weird to be trying to save prisoners at the same time you're selling commercial driver's licenses for cash money. But those don't really matter to me; Abe Lincoln's motives probably weren't as pure as the driven snow, either, but here we are. (Or, as a more germaine and recent example, LBJ's motives for pushing through civil rights legislation as a young pol were highly suspect, but it beats the alternative...)

Is it the latest New Yorker? The last couple are still sitting on the floor undr the mail slot.

It's actually the second-to-latest; Jan 6th. ("Annals of Law")

Right, I agree about motivations. If the good thing gets done, cool.

death penalty
I agree with you, Dlowon. I feel that the worst murder of all is the murder of an innocent person by the State, simply because SOMEONE must die when there is a capital offense committed. For me the horror here is compounded by the fact that such executions are performed in MY name. The system of capital punishment is clearly flawed in virtually all states. Where there is doubt, commute. Anyone who would prefer to kill an innocent person rather than let a guilty go free is despicable in my judgement. And police and prosecutors who are found to have railroaded individuals for the sake of their success record are crimminals in the highest degree and should be treated as such. As an aside, I'll bet if a good study were done we'd find a very significant correlation between people who support the death penalty and pro-lifers.

What JLN said.

Governor Ryan's blanket commutation of death sentences is horrific. For those who have been convicted wrongly, it is perfectly acceptable to commute or dismiss their sentences. However, these are few. The majority of criminals whom Ryan is helping to get away with murder are stone cold guilty.

Murder is a dumb crime done most often for dumb reasons. Generally, it's done by men who are not particularly bright for reasons that are foolish. The ones convicted are the easiest ones to catch because of the sheer dumbness of their crime. One of the murderers Ryan thought deserved a break had kidnapped his neighbor and buried him alive. Others had raped and murdered their neighbors. If this kind of unimaginable violence had been done to your loved ones and the state decided to give the author of that malice a break, would you consider it justice?

You might also remember that kicking convicted murderers loose to roam the streets also costs innocent lives because being violent people, they do violence when freed. Back in the 1980s, a study of US prisons showed that 625 prisoners were in jail for their SECOND murder conviction. That means that they did murder, went to jail, were freed, did murder again, and were convicted again. That's 625 innocent people dead because the death penalty was not enforced. Governor Ryan is setting up a lot of stone killers to be paroled. When they are freed by the liberals, blood will run in the streets.

The reason criminal law was originally created was to dispense justice. Instead of families taking personal revenge for wrongs committed against their loved ones, the government agreed to take their revenge for them so that overreaction did not spiral into vendettas that spanned generations. In the first code of justice in ancient Mesopotamia, Hammurabi developed his code of punishments for various offenses as a sort of quality control for punishment, so that the state would take revenge for you in a predictable and reliable manner.

Governor Ryan abandons this basic tenet of the law and takes instead the position that the government cares nothing for the families of those whose loved ones were savaged by these psychopaths. The sympathy of the Left lies clearly with the murderers and not with their victims.
That's why liberals can not be trusted to run the government.

Tantor

Tantor -

Commutation is not exoneration. The vast majority of the sentences have been commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole.

If you can spare a killer the death sentence, think how much easier it is to then spare that same killer serving a life sentence from actually serving his whole life. The next step is to make a life sentence twenty years. The step after that is to give years of credit for good behavior. The step after that is parole.

In Texas, convicted killer Kenneth McDuff was sentenced to die for shooting two teenaged boys and then raping and strangling the teenaged girl with them. He took a broomstick and crushed her throat in the middle of a dirt road. The liberals spared him from the death sentence. Then they spared him from a life sentence. Then they paroled him.

Within a couple weeks he was killing young women again. He took a few from convenience stores, including a pregnant woman. He took one who was washing her car. Her last words as she was carried off to McDuff's car to be gang-raped and strangled were "Not me. Not me"

McDuff killed a whole new string of young girls before he was caught again, convicted again, and sentenced to death again. This time the liberals were out of office and the conservatives back in. McDuff was executed, never to kill again.

Right now, Charles Manson, once sentenced to death and spared by the liberals, now regularly comes up for parole. So does Sirhan Sirhan, the killer of Bobby Kennedy. So do many other sick vicious murdering maniacs. What do you think will happen when the liberals finally set them free? Were it up to the conservatives, these sick trash would long ago be planted in unmarked graves and the weary minds of their victims families would be set at rest, never having to worry about the day when these psychopaths get loose.

The problem here is that the liberals sympathies lie with the killers, not their victims and their families, and deny them the justice they deserve. It is wrong.

Tantor

If the fault of the people that were convicted to death penalty was not proven, then they should be merely set free: no one can be considered a criminal and punished if his/her guilt is not proven.
If, on the contrary, all these people really committed their crimes (I guess, first degree murder), and this was proven in court, such an action by the Governor sounds like a message to all the violent criminals still at large: "Go on, guys, shoot anyone you find it necessary, you still have good chances to remain alive, even if the court decides that you deserve death".

Tantor, you really think there aren't equally horrific stories of innocent (innocent) people being put to death by the state? One emotional story (and yes, it's horrible) does not a policy make.

"Regularly comes up for parole" is not the same as "got parole."

Making sure killers are punished thoroughly -- sure. I agree. Sock it to 'em. The questions are, 1) how do you KNOW they are guilty? 2) Are you willing to kill some innocent people as collateral damage, gettin' those bad guys? 3) Does the death penalty work, deterrent-wise?

If the death penalty is really applied, it may deter. But decisions like this of the Illinois governor decrease it deterrent efficiency.

Quite frankly, no, I have yet to hear an authentic story of an innocent man being legally executed in America. Please provide that story that you allude to.

I have heard plenty of false assertions of innocence of murderers based on nonsense. I suspect that you will provide one of these at best.



Tell it to the family of Coleen Reed, the girl Kenneth McDuff kidnapped, raped, and strangled after receiving parole for his previous triple homicide.



The trial decides guilt. The bias in murder trials is very much in favor of letting the guilty go free. The odds are that if you are put on trial for murder, you are probably guilty. Even if guilty, you have a good shot at getting away with it. Perhaps you recall OJ.

Innocent people die when you don't enforce the death penalty. Please reread my previous post about the parole of murderer Kenneth McDuff. There are half a dozen dead girls because the state did not carry out McDuff's death penalty.

The deterrent effect of the death penalty is intuitively obvious to the casual observer. If you execute a murderer, he is deterred from further murders. If you deny this, I challenge you to produce one example of a murderer who has been executed who has gone on to kill again. In addition to that obvious deterrence, there is the secondary deterrence of criminals who refrain from killing in death penalty states. There are anecdotes of robbers explicitly talking over whether they should kill their bound victims as they lay helpless and then deciding against it because there is a death penalty in that state.

Tantor

Excellent point, steissd. If Governor Ryan really believed that these convicted killers were innocent, why are they in prison at all? Why aren't they free? If he truly believes these murderers have been wrongfully convicted, doesn't keeping them in prison compound their wrongful suffering?

Keeping these killers in prison demonstrates that the Governor believes them to be guilty. Commuting their sentences demonstrates his opposition to the death penalty rather than his support of justice.

Tantor

He really believed (well, we went into motivations before -- who knows what he really believed) that there was too high of a CHANCE that they MIGHT be innocent; "I can't play God."



It's not about believing they're guilty, or believing they're innocent. It's that he doesn't know.

He did not want to play God, but he actually did: he granted them life overruling decision of the HUMANS' court.

since 1973 103 people sentenced to the death penalty have since been proven innocent.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innoc.html

Tantor!!!

You're back! And you've brought your suitcases full of generalizations, logical fallacies, strawman arguments and your papal balcony to shout them from. I've missed you so.

ROTFL, blatham

12 death-penalty verdicts in the state of Illinois have been overturned in the past decade or so. The sentences were commuted not because Ryan opposes the death penatly (he doesn't), but because there had been substantial evidence that the system that had been convicting defendants in capital cases during this time had been faulty. By commuting their sentences to life in prison the intention is to leave open the possibility that new evidence may come to light, as happened three times in the mere 9 months that I lived in Chicago. Had there not been a critical eye cast at the system during this time, what do you think the chances are that these three men would still be alive.

Tantor, I'm glad that your faith in the efficacy of our justice system is absolute. Mine is not, and in the case of Illinois I think there is substantial reason to instate at least a temporary moratorium on executions, regardless of one's philosophical stance on capital punishment.

ryan
There is no doubt in mind that the death penalty system is terribly broken. A judge acquaintance of mine once raised the hairs on my neck telling me of his experience with the degree of faultiness of the system. Gov. Ryan was not playing God; he was playing governor: it was his OFFICIAL prerogative to commute those lethal sentences. He did so because of his KNOWLEDGE of the degree to which the system is broken. He is, because of the flack he knew he would receive for doing the right thing, a HERO. To H.....with those whose suffering drives them to feel that REVENGE is their solution, as if it would really compensate them for their losses. If I lost a close friend or relative to murder, I hope I would have the sense to want very much that not just anyone would die for the crime; I should want to be sure that the guilty individual(s) were punished, not some hispanic or black scapegoat (while the actual murderer goes free). But most crime victims lose their rational sense of justice; they only want its crooked cousin, irrational revenge.