|
CounterPunch
February
1, 2003
Victory in Illinois
Emptying Death
Row
by ALAN MAASS
He was asked about his last meal, and his relatives
had been told how to retrieve his body. Illinois' executioners
were practicing with their equipment at the brand-new "super-max"
prison in downstate Tamms, before using it for the first time
on Anthony Porter. But with less than 48 hours to go, the phone
call came. Porter was saved from the death chamber by the Illinois
Supreme Court.
None of the justices questioned his guilt--they
were among the 30 judges at all levels of the court system who
signed off on the evidence that Porter had committed a 1982 double
murder in Chicago. The execution was only stopped in September
1998 for a "fitness hearing"--to determine whether
Porter's IQ was high enough for him to be put to death.
It wasn't until four-and-a-half months
after Porter was scheduled to die that a group of college journalism
students and their professor uncovered the evidence that proved
Anthony Porter was innocent.
Porter's exoneration--well after he was
supposed to be dead--exposed the appalling state of the Illinois
death penalty system like no other case before it. In one court
after another for 17 years, that system failed completely to
discover that he was an innocent man.
"This wasn't a matter of the police
and the prosecution and the courts or the defense lawyers establishing
the innocence of someone," says Stephen Bright, one of the
country's top death penalty lawyers and head of the Southern
Center for Human Rights. "It really was people from outside
the system who demonstrated that."
"There are lots of cases where there
isn't a journalism class, and there's no competent lawyer to
take a second look. And so the nightmare is how many of these
cases are there that we don't know about--that have the same
miscarriages of justice."
Over the next year, three more men--Steven
Smith, Ronald Jones and Steven Manning--would be proven innocent,
making a total of 13 prisoners set free from death row in 13
years. The innocence cases highlighted the indictment of the
death penalty system from a number of directions.
Shortly before Porter was freed, the
Northwestern University law school held a national conference
on wrongful convictions that brought together legal experts and
activist opponents of capital punishment from around the country.
The traditionally Republican Chicago
Tribune published multi-part investigative series that focused
on one injustice after another--from the incompetent lawyers
who represented dozens of death row prisoners, to the use of
snitch testimony against others, to cases of mishandled scientific
evidence against still others.
Meanwhile, grassroots organizations continued
to reach out to a growing audience of people with doubts about
the death penalty, holding neighborhood discussions, public forums
and demonstrations.
"We haven't been a mass movement,
in the sense of the civil rights movement," says Marlene
Martin, national director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
"But we do have elements of that movement. Over the years,
the grassroots activism had an impact. When Ryan came into office,
the legitimacy of the justice system was at stake, and that's
where the efforts of people to keep the issue in the public eye
were important--in making the case of what he had to do about
it."
All this led up to Gov. George Ryan's
announcement on January 30, 2000, that he was halting all executions.
"Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in
Illinois is truly guilty," Ryan said, "until I can
be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is
facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate."
Justice for
the Death Row 10!
DURING THE summer of 1998, while George
Ryan was still on the campaign trail, Stanley Howard and Aaron
Patterson were discussing the Death Row 10. It wasn't easy. Howard
and Patterson were prisoners on death row in Pontiac, Ill., spending
23 hours a day in their cramped cells--so yelling down the tiers
was the main way to communicate.
The Death Row 10--which eventually numbered
13 when all its members were discovered--are a group of African
American men who were tortured by Chicago police into making
confessions that were used to send them to death row.
Howard was suffocated with a plastic
typewriter cover while he was continuously beaten. Patterson
was beaten, suffocated and threatened with a gun. Leroy Orange
and Leonard Kidd were electro-shocked with a black box device
attached to their genitals. Grayland Johnson was hung halfway
out an open window.
The torture chambers, run by Lt. Jon
Burge at Area 2 and 3 police headquarters on Chicago's South
Side, weren't a secret. The department even forced Burge to resign
because of the allegations in 1993--though only after a confidential
internal report surfaced, detailing more than 50 cases of "systematic"
torture by Burge and the animals that he commanded.
That Burge was kicked out was the result
of a long struggle by anti-police brutality activists, begun
in the early 1980s by mothers of torture victims. But Burge got
to retire on a full police pension in Florida, spending his days
on his fishing boat The Vigilante--while his victims remained
behind bars. Though the cops' record of torture was an acknowledged
fact, not a single one of the Death Row 10 won a new trial or
sentencing hearing.
With questions about the death penalty
system building, Howard contacted the Campaign to End the Death
Penalty to be the voice of the Death Row 10 on the "outside."
From death row, the prisoners called the first Death Row 10 rally
for September 1998, making a leaflet with a typewriter and headlines
cut out of the Campaign's New Abolitionist newsletter and Socialist
Worker, among other publications.
Since then, Death Row 10 members have
spoken out around the country--via speakerphone at "Live
from Death Row" events organized by the Campaign and other
organizations. In Chicago, activists organized petitioning and
demonstrations to put pressure on the prosecutor, Cook County
State's Attorney Dick Devine, to look into the torture allegations.
But Devine has been desperate to head
off an investigation. And no wonder--he was an assistant prosecutor
when Burge's torturers were operating at full steam, and he later
worked for a private law firm that defended Burge during the
police investigation.
"[Burge] was certainly the ringleader
of the torture," says Flint Taylor, a lawyer with the People's
Law Office, who led the effort to expose Burge back in the 1980s.
"But there were ringleaders of the cover-up, too."
The cases of the Death Row 10 began to
gain media attention. But more generally, the torture issue showed
how police and prosecutors grease the rails to the death chamber,
whether to satisfy their sadism or to build up political reputations.
"The call had been going out for
many years, and there was community interest, but there just
wasn't a critical mass," Taylor says. But when Ryan declared
a moratorium, the torture issue "came together at a time
when the momentum was building with regard to the death penalty."
Last April, a state appeals court judge appointed a special prosecutor
to look into the Burge torture cases and the cover-up that followed.
And the struggle for the Death Row 10
that began with a typewritten leaflet made inside Pontiac prison
plainly had a huge impact on Ryan. His pardons for death row
prisoners went to four of the Death Row 10, and his speeches
explaining his decision returned again and again to the torture
chambers at Area 2 and 3 headquarters as an example of what's
wrong with the death penalty system.
"Who knows if Governor Ryan would
have even known about the Death Row 10 if not for the activism
around these cases?" says Alice Kim, an organizer for the
Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
Opening up
a national debate
RYAN'S DECLARATION of a moratorium in
January 2000 expanded the growing national debate on the death
penalty. True to form, some Illinois politicians dismissed the
halt on executions as a publicity stunt by Ryan--to draw attention
away from a rapidly developing corruption scandal that eventually
forced him to give up on re-election.
But the depth of questioning could be
seen across the country--reflected, for example, in surprisingly
frank newspaper editorials against capital punishment, though
they came after years of silence on the subject in many cases.
"To support the death penalty is,
in effect, to support the state-sanctioned killing of innocent
people," wrote the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Florida's
Gainesville Sun added: "Gov. Ryan has said he wants no innocent
blood on his hands as a result of human error. The hurry-up-and-kill-em
politicians would rather apologize after the fact."
But another factor was at work in pushing
the death penalty into the national spotlight--the presidential
campaign of the Texecutioner, George W. Bush. In his five years
as governor of Texas, Bush oversaw a total of 152 executions--incredibly,
more than one out of every five state-sponsored killings that
had taken place since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
Bush's total lack of concern about any of the issues raised by
death penalty opponents added fuel to the fire.
As in Illinois, the nightmare of innocent
people being sent to their death was the most prominent question.
But the other dirty secrets of the death penalty system began
to emerge--the frighteningly bad quality of lawyers representing
capital defendants, for example, and the fact that death rows
across the country are made up disproportionately of minorities
and almost exclusively of the poor.
Then there's the erratic way that decisions
to pursue the death penalty get made. Rob Warden, executive director
of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions,
points out that there are 102 state's attorneys making decisions
about prosecutions in Illinois--one for each county--and the
state's laws do little to control them.
"If [the death penalty system] has
had an error rate that's so egregious on the fundamental question
of guilt or innocence," he says, "we can only imagine
how serious that error rate must be when it comes to aggravation
and mitigation" and the other factors that decide whether
someone convicted of murder gets a death sentence or a term in
prison.
Once the centerpiece of the politicians'
law-and-order agenda, the death penalty was now being questioned
not only by long-time opponents, but by mainstream voices. As
ABC's Ted Koppel put it in bluntly summarizing a four-part Nightline
investigation: "The percentage of men and women sitting
on death row who are Black or Hispanic and poor is so out of
proportion to their numbers in the general population that we
cannot continue to insist that the system is fair or that the
justice we dispense is equal. We can choose to ignore that. But
we can't deny it."
The conclusions of a special commission
appointed by Ryan to investigate the Illinois death penalty system
only underlined these issues. When it began meeting in 2000,
an early straw vote of the 14 members on the question of whether
the death penalty should be abolished turned up only four in
favor. But after two years of study, the margin was 8-to-5 in
favor of abolition, according to press reports.
Yet that didn't make it into the commission's
published conclusions--because pro-death penalty members insisted
that the panel could only propose "reforms." The final
report, issued last April, recommended a total of 85 reforms
necessary to ensure "fairness" in the death penalty
system--though the commission admitted that even if each one
was implemented, an innocent person could still end up sentenced
to death.
The report opened up a debate among opponents
of the death penalty about whether such an unjust system could
ever be "reformed"--and if not, then maybe the commission's
proposals should be opposed as window-dressing. But the Illinois
legislature settled the question--by refusing to pass any change
at all.
Ryan proposed three separate packages
of legislation to take up aspects of the commission's study,
but each one was shot down. The only legislation pertaining to
the death penalty that did pass the statehouse was a post-September
11 proposal to expand capital punishment--and it became law over
a veto by Ryan.
"They absolutely and systematically
refused, in the case of the legislature, to institute any reforms,
and in the case of the prosecutors, to do any housecleaning and
make any admission at all of the problems," said Jennifer
Bishop-Jenkins, a national board member of Murder Victims' Families
for Reconciliation, who was active in the fight in Illinois.
"Not even just to say that we screwed
up, but we'll do better now. I think that was the short-term
thing that really pushed Governor Ryan over the edge. He knew
he had no other choice but to act, because they did nothing."
The battle
over blanket clemency
AFTER A speech at the University of Oregon
law school last March, Ryan responded to a reporter's question
by saying that he would consider a blanket commutation of every
death sentence in the state.
That was exactly what a group of anti-death
penalty lawyers centered around the State Appellate Defender's
office wanted to hear. They had been discussing this very possibility
for more than a year--and began putting their strategy of asking
Ryan for blanket clemency into high gear.
Likewise, activist groups reacted to
Ryan's statement with a campaign to support blanket commutations.
One of the most important parts of their efforts, these groups
say, was to give a voice to those most immediately affected by
the death penalty--prisoners themselves, and their family members.
So town hall meetings in Chicago featured
live call-ins from death row--and the testimony of relatives.
"When something like this happens, as a family member, you
don't know what to do, you don't know where to turn," says
Gricelda Ceja, the mother of death row prisoner Raul Ceja. "And
I'll tell you, people in the Campaign were such a help as far
as providing support and being there and pointing you in the
right direction. We appreciate it as family members--it's just
helped us so much."
Activists in Illinois worked with a new
sense of urgency because the moratorium on executions seemed
like it might come to an end--and possibly sooner rather than
later. With Ryan not running for re-election, both the Democratic
and Republican candidates for the 2002 election were pro-death
penalty.
The Republican, Jim Ryan, built his political
career around capital punishment. He started out in politics
as the prosecutor for the Chicago suburbs of DuPage County--where
he oversaw the wrongful conviction of Rolando Cruz and Alejandro
Hernandez, two of the best-known cases of innocent men sent to
death row.
But in some ways, his Democratic opponent--and
the eventual winner in November--Rod Blagojevich, was worse.
For example, in pandering to the Fraternal Order of Police to
win its endorsement, Blagojevich came out opposed to the videotaping
interrogations, something that Jim Ryan had said he would support.
Even as death penalty opponents stepped
up the pressure, the other side organized a counterattack. At
hearings into clemency petitions conducted by the Illinois Prisoner
Review Board, prosecutors organized a parade of the relatives
of murder victims to demand that Ryan not commute any death sentences.
The hearings became a media circus, with the injustices of the
death penalty system drowned out by the horrible details of the
murders, described by relatives reliving the suffering of their
loved ones.
"That was a conscious decision by
the prosecutors not to deal with the issues in these cases,"
said Frank Ralph, a Chicago lawyer who led the legal effort to
win a special prosecutor into the Burge torture cases. "They
had a chance to address these points and speak directly to the
governor through the prisoner review board, and they chose not
to."
Gary Gauger, a former Illinois death
row prisoner who was exonerated and set free in 1996, says that
the hearings were "incredibly typical of the prosecutors."
"They were blaming George Ryan for these poor people having
to relive the anguish of their loved ones being killed, and yet
it wasn't George Ryan who called these hearings," Gauger
said. "It was the prosecutors who assembled these people
and had them get up there and relive the experience, strictly
for the grief and shock factor. They built their careers by killing
people, and this was basically a selfish ploy of their own to
exploit the grief of the victims."
The ploy worked. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch
poll of Illinois voters conducted before the hearings showed
50 percent opposed to blanket clemency and 46 percent in favor.
One conducted a few weeks later showed the gap widening to 55
percent opposed and 40 percent in favor. Ryan himself began telling
reporters that he had "pretty much ruled out" blanket
commutations.
The weeks during and after the hearings
were tough ones for death penalty opponents, but without their
activity in the face of the prosecutors' attack, Ryan might never
have felt the pressure to shift back. Members of the Campaign
to End the Death Penalty, for example, organized a press conference
outside the clemency hearings that brought together exonerated
prisoners with death row family members.
The Center on Wrongful Convictions called
a second innocence conference at Northwestern, bringing together
three dozen people exonerated from death rows across the country.
The following day--in an echo of the civil rights movement--the
wrongfully convicted participated in a relay march, carrying
a letter urging commutations from the state prison near Joliet
to the door of Ryan's downtown Chicago office.
On New Year's Eve, Rev. Jesse Jackson
joined family members of prisoners and Campaign activists on
a visit to death row in Pontiac, where he added his voice to
the call for clemency. A few days later, an even larger group
of relatives met with Ryan to urge him to pardon or commute the
death sentences of their loved ones. And for each of these, there
were a dozen other events--press conferences, pickets, petitionings,
public meetings.
Alice Kim of the Campaign says that these
final weeks made a big difference. "Politicians, George
Ryan included, are influenced by public pressure," she says.
"When the prosecutors went on the offensive around the clemency
hearings, that's when Ryan said he put blanket commutations on
the backburner. But then he heard from our side."
Winning hands-down
WHEN RYAN scheduled speeches on the death
penalty for his final days in office at the Northwestern and
DePaul University law schools--both of them centers of the legal
fight against the death penalty--it was clear that he wouldn't
be siding with prosecutors. Even so, the scale of his actions
sent shock waves around the country.
Ryan announced the pardons for Madison
Hobley, Stanley Howard, Leroy Orange and Aaron Patterson, and
the blanket clemency for every other prisoner facing the death
penalty. But more than that, his speeches explaining his actions
were a stunning indictment--not only of the death penalty, but
the whole criminal justice system.
Ryan rose to prominence in Republican
Party politics as a darling of conservatives. But you would never
know it from his scathing critique of law enforcement. He singled
out Burge and the Chicago police, tore into prosecutors who used
the death penalty to further their political careers--and then
hammered state legislators of both parties for refusing to lift
a finger about any of it.
For Robin Hobley, Madison's sister, who
spent long years pleading for her brother's freedom, it was hard
to grasp what was happening. "I didn't believe it, even
though it was written in the paper, and people were telling me
congratulations," she said.
"I think there were a lot of factors
that led to this and opened up the doors for the governor to
be able to do this," Robin says. "For Madison, one
thing was me out working with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty
across the country. That helped tremendously in getting the message
out and for people to hear it."
Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins echoes the importance
of the years of organizing. "We have a really large, dedicated,
very diverse and very committed group of activists," she
says. "I really do think that the activists are a lot responsible
for this, because we created a public climate."
Rob Warden of the Center on Wrongful
Convictions agrees. "Chick Hoffman of the state appellate
defenders' office said, 'We were an army of ants.' And we really
were," Warden says. "This took work by literally hundreds
of people. You can look at this and say that, without certain
components, this never would have happened. If it hadn't been
for the grassroots organizations, there is no doubt that we wouldn't
be where we are today."
The battle
ahead
AS SOON AS RYAN finished speaking, prosecutors
and right-wing politicians were sputtering and fuming for the
TV cameras. Dick Devine, the Cook County prosecutor, finally
admitted that the death penalty system was "broken"--but
only as of that afternoon, when Ryan emptied death row.
"George Ryan was the messenger,"
says Larry Marshall, the legal director of the Center for Wrongful
Convictions. "And because they are so personally humiliated
by the message, they're shooting the messenger. But the fact
is that this was a slap in the face to the system, which is exactly
what sometimes is necessary as a matter of a wakeup call."
As Bishop-Jenkins puts it, "The
reason why the prosecutors are saying this--your Dick Devines
and Joe Birketts--is because they ran out of arguments. They
wouldn't clean house, they wouldn't admit wrongdoing, they wouldn't
look at their own problems, and so they had to try to pull out
at the end the only card that they could play politically, which
was a very emotionally manipulative one, and one which re-victimizes
those victims one more time."
Death penalty opponents aren't letting
Devine and Co. go unopposed. On Martin Luther King Day, Rep.
Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) hosted a press conference in Chicago to put
pressure on the special prosecutor in the Burge torture cases--and
turn up the heat on Devine. Anti-death penalty lawyers are preparing
for legal challenges from prosecutors to Ryan's commutations.
Meanwhile, the three men freed from death
row (Stanley Howard remains behind bars, serving time for another
conviction) are determined to fight for those they left behind.
"We were wondering when our turn was going to come,"
Madison Hobley told an audience of more than 100 at a Chicago
neighborhood meeting to celebrate the victory in Illinois. "Their
turn is going to come, too. They're coming home, as long as we
continue to be together and fight for the cause."
Likewise, activists are turning to the
fight to get rid of the death penalty, once and for all. State
Rep. Art Turner and several other lawmakers have reintroduced
legislation that would abolish the death penalty. At the national
level, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
(D-Ill.) have said they will reintroduce measures to impose a
national moratorium on executions.
Will it happen? The new Democratic president
of the Illinois state Senate, Emil Jones of Chicago, says that,
while he personally supports abolition, voting for Turner's proposal
would be "political suicide."
But anti-death penalty activists have
heard that line before. "We've got as far as we have because
we made an impact on public opinion," says Marlene Martin
of the Campaign. "So even though a majority of people support
the death penalty, we still saw that 70-plus percent were in
favor of the moratorium. That's something to build on, in making
sure that people understand the real face of the death penalty--that
it's brutal, dehumanizing, racist and wrong. If we can create
that kind of climate, it won't be political suicide for politicians
like Emil Jones. In fact, he'll think he has to do it. What happened
in Illinois is an enormous step forward. This could be the beginning
of the end of the death penalty in the United States."
Former death row prisoner Ronald Kitchen
knows that there's still a fight ahead. If anyone has the right
to be angry about the outcome in Illinois, it's Kitchen. Another
member of the Death Row 10, he was hoping for a pardon from Ryan
based on the pile of evidence of his innocence. But he remains
unjustly imprisoned, facing a sentence of life without parole.
Nevertheless, Kitchen says, "We
might be left behind, but we aren't forgotten. That's what it's
all about. We have to continue to fight, and put it out there
for people to see that this is not over with yet."
Alan Maass is an editor of Socialist
Worker. He
can be reached at: maass@socialistworker.org
Yesterday's
Features
Muqtedar Khan
Heavy
Rhetoric, Wistful Thinking and Hydrogen Cars: a response to Bush's
State of the Union
William Hughes
An
Open Letter to France:
Justice is On Your Side
David Wilson
Meet
the Gloucester Weapons Inspectors: the Protest at the Fairford
Stealth Bomber Base
Anthony Gancarski
Free
Press? "There's No Damn Thing"
Josh Frank
Who Would Jesus Bomb?: 10 Reasons to Oppose War on Iraq
Abu Spinoza
Iraq: Web Resources
Dr. Gerry Lower
Class Warfare Against the Poor
Natalie Johnson Lee
Green
Party Response to Bush's State of the Union
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
Stealing Money from Kids
Maria Tomchick
Bush's Smallpox Boondoggle
Paul di Rooij
War: It's Already Started
Website of the Day
Tie
Yourself to the Mast Brave Odysseus: Ashcroft Sings!
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|