Illinois Passes Comprehensive Reform Bill: Co-Chair of Ryan Commission Urges Continuation of Death Penalty Reform
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Chicago - Thomas P. Sullivan, co-chair of the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment, today joined with other death penalty experts in praising recent progress on death penalty reform, but cautioned that the reform process must continue to address serious flaws in the system that led to 17 wrongful convictions in Illinois capital cases.
“The legislature and the governor deserve credit for important steps taken toward a more fair and accurate system, but we must continue to work on major problems this legislation has not addressed,” said Sullivan. Sullivan highlighted several key Commission recommendations that still need to be implemented, including reforms in the way eyewitness identifications are made, reduction in cases eligible for capital punishment, a statewide review commission to supervise selection of death cases, appointment of a public defender for poor persons under arrest at police stations, and creation of an independent state forensics lab separate from police agencies.
The new law, SB 472, creates the Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee to evaluate the effectiveness of the reforms. “This assessment of the effectiveness of these reforms in practice needs to be given a chance to proceed before we can even think about declaring that the job is done,” said Lawrence C. Marshall, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School. Marshall pointed out that the recording of interrogations law does not even take effect for two years, making calls for the lifting of the moratorium seriously premature.
“Many reforms will depend on how judges, police and prosecutors implement them — it is much to soon to tell if they will successfully get to the root problems, said Edwin Colfax, executive director of the Illinois Death Penalty Education Project.
“This legislation does not really address the problem of eyewitness fallibility, which is the leading cause of wrongful convictions,” said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School. “The bill only creates a pilot project on key line-up reforms, but we need full implementation.”
The bill does not address the important recommendation concerning forensic science reform. “At a minimum we need substantive independent oversight of police forensic labs, to ensure that they fully adopt standards of objectivity that the rest of science all embrace,” said Colfax. The Illinois State Police Crime Lab is only peer accredited by the National Association of Crime Lab Directors.
Finally, the bill does not address the arbitrary and uneven way in which some are singled out for the death penalty while others get life without parole. “Jurisdictional and racial sentencing disparities demand statewide oversight of the decision to seek the death penalty,” said Colfax. The new law only very marginally narrows the aggravating factors. “We must make substantial reductions as recommended by the commission — overbroad eligibility factors only aggravate this unfairness,” said Colfax.
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What SB 472 Does: (Highlights)
• Requires reliability screening of jailhouse snitch testimony in capital cases
• Provides access to pre-trial and post-conviction DNA database searches
• Creates an eyewitness pilot project in three jurisdictions to test new, more accurate line-up procedures. The pilot has three key elements: 1) Uses the double-blind procedure: the administrator of the line-up is unaware of which person is the suspect to avoid influencing the witness, 2) Sequential procedure, instead of showing suspects at the same time, and 3) collecting a statement from the witness at the time of the identification noting his/her level of confidence in the ID prior to any feedback from authorities.
• Requires that all eyewitnesses exposed to a line-up must sign a form informing the witness: a) that the suspect might not be in the line-up or photo-spread, and the witness is not obligated to make an identification, and b) that the witness should not assume that the person administering the line-up or photo-spread knows which person is the suspect in the case. [Note: this law does not require double-blind line-ups. The pilot project above includes double-blind procedures.]
• Requires disclosure of information relevant to the credibility of “jailhouse snitch” and other witnesses in capital cases, including any inducements for testimony.
• Creates a committee to study the impact of the various reforms to the capital punishment system.
• Gives the Illinois Supreme Court broad power to overturn death sentences it deems fundamentally unjust as applied to the particular case, independent of any procedural grounds for relief.
• Provides that a trial judge who disagrees with a jury’s imposition of death shall set forth reasons in writing, and this becomes part of the record for appellate review. The trial judge is still bound by the jury’s sentencing determination.
• Slightly modifies the most used death eligibility factor, “murder in the course of another felony” to very marginally reduce death-eligible crimes.
• No death-eligibility based only on the uncorroborated testimony of jailhouse snitches, or when the sole evidence against the defendant is a single eyewitness or single accomplice without any other corroborating evidence.
• Creates a recording of interrogations pilot program, which supplements a separate bill already signed into law that implements taping in two years.
• Provides that State’s Attorneys and the Attorney General will confer regarding non-binding, “advisory” guidelines for seeking the death penalty.
• Bars death penalty for the retarded (required by US Supreme Court)
What SB 472 Does Not Do:
• Does not substantially reduce the eligibility factors for the death penalty.
• Does not create state-wide oversight of the decision to seek the death penalty, thus allowing jurisdictional vagaries in sentencing to persist.
• Does not create an independent forensic science lab separate from police agencies.
• Does not create independent oversight of forensic labs. (The Illinois State Police Crime Lab is currently “peer accredited” by the American Society of Crime Lab Directors).
• Does not change forensic lab procedures to require true double-blind testing.
• Does not fully implement more accurate eyewitness identification procedures for line-ups. (The bill only creates a pilot project to evaluate proposed procedures which decades of research have established as more accurate.)
• Does not institutionalize a mechanism for investigating and responding to instances of wrongful convictions.
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The Justice Project [ http://www.thejusticeproject.org ] (TJP) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that addresses issues of social justice here and abroad. TJP’s Campaign for Criminal Justice Reform is a national initiative that addresses flaws in the American justice system.
