State Campaigns

[History] [Current Efforts] [Studies]

History: Illinois' Crisis of Innocents on Death Row Drives Reform

In recent years, Illinois has been at the forefront of death penalty and criminal justice reform.  Spurred by an alarming record of 13 people exonerated off death row during a period in which the state executed 12 people (as of November 2005, the exoneration figure has grown to 18), Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in 2000 and appointed the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment to study the flaws.  The commission's report was issued after over two years of study, and it represents the most comprehensive analysis of systemic risks or conviction of the innocent ever conducted.  Not surprisingly, many of the systemic flaws that put innocent men on death row were found to be present throughout the criminal justice system, not only in capital cases.

The death penalty system was deemed so unreliable that Governor Ryan commuted all death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole in January 2003.  The system had been proven unreliable repeatedly on the threshold question of innocence, and was no more deserving of our confidence in its sentencing determinations, the governor argued.  The risk of a fatal mistake was unacceptable. Governor Rod Blagojevich has continued the moratorium on executions, though death sentences continue to be issued in the state, though at a greatly reduced rate of approximately two per year, down from an average of 11 per year.

After rejecting most reform measures for years, the legislature finally acted in 2003 with a reform package that incorporated many of the recommendations of the Governor's Commission, including mandating electronic recording of custodial interrogation in homicide cases, requiring a special reliability hearing for unreliable jailhouse snitch witnesses and removing eligibility for the death sentence based on the uncorroborated testimony of a single eyewitness, accomplice or jailhouse snitch.  The legislation also created the Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, tasked with monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of reforms to date in dealing with the flaws identified by the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment.

Other important reforms include the Illinois Supreme Court-created Capital Litigation Trial Bar, which created standards of experience that must be met by attorneys in death penalty cases, in response to the disastrous record of unqualified attorneys.  The legislature has also created the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, which provides state funds to both prosecutors and the defense, and has been an important step toward fairness and effective representation for defendants by dispensing funds for expert witnesses and other special expenses. The Justice Project is continuing to work to draw the attention of the public and policymakers to these important reforms.

While numerous important reforms have been implemented, many of the most essential reform recommendations of the Governor's Commission still await action.  These include implementation of a more accurate eyewitness identification protocol for photo and live lineups (a pilot project was just completed), establishing the state's forensic lab as an independent, objective agency separate from the police, addressing the arbitrary implementation of the death penalty, both by creating a statewide oversight committee to review individual prosecutors' decisions to pursue the death penalty, and reducing the long list of aggravating factors that make a case death eligible.

The current status for each of the Commission's 85 recommendations is available online from the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Current Efforts in Illinois

On March 17, the Chicago Police submitted a report to the Illinois Legislature on their year-long pilot program testing sequential double-blind eyewitness identification procedures. Eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States, and The Justice Project supports sequential double-blind procedures which have been shown to enhance accuracy in eyewitness identifications. Most experts believe the main value of the Chicago pilot project was to identify and work through logistical issues in implementation, but many opponents of reform have used the test run to second-guess the science. The report claimed that the reform protocol yielded poor results when compared with the traditional approach. Leading experts have pointed out, however, that the design of the study was not set up properly to yield meaningful comparative data because it did not separate out control groups for multiple variables, leading to muddled data. The report's authors interpreted the data as evidence for preserving the status quo, while many scientists have explained that the muddled data cannot yield meaningful comparative results.

Effective reforms like double-blind, sequential lineups have already been instituted with great success in jurisdictions across the country. The Justice Project will help ensure that opponents of reform do not use Chicago's flawed research to undermine reforms based on solid science in Illinois or throughout the country. For more detailed remarks on the Illinois Pilot Project, see the comments of Gary Wells, Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University and leading expert on the reliability of eyewitness identifications.