“This is not the case to make a point with. There are no doubts about this guy’s guilt. In some ways, these guys were worse than Gacy.”
Surrounded by aides, I stared at the speakerphone in the center of the conference table. Disembodied voices of staff members in Springfield were urging me to get on with it—sign off on Kokoraleis’s death warrant. This wasn’t the first time Kokoraleis was being compared to John Wayne Gacy, one of the worst serial killers in the nation’s history.
We were sitting in my office on the sixteenth floor of the James R. Thompson State of Illinois Building in downtown Chicago. The building had opened in 1985 and was renamed after James R. Thompson in 1993, the governor who signed the Illinois death penalty legislation into law in 1977.
Early in March, Kokoraleis’s execution had been temporarily halted on the order of Illinois Supreme Court Justice Moses Harrison II, an outspoken opponent of capital punishment. Harrison granted the delay so Kokoraleis’s defense attorneys could take one last chance to ask the US Supreme Court to review an appeal.
We were now a week away from the execution, which was scheduled for March 17. Kokoraleis’s defense attorneys had asked the US Supreme Court to halt the execution to review another appeal. Although there had been no ruling yet from the Supreme Court, the smart money was on a decision to let the execution go forward—which meant it would be irrevocably in my hands.
Lawyers for Kokoraleis also submitted a clemency petition to my office. His lawyers said there was reason to believe that Kokoraleis was innocent of the murder of Lorraine Borowski—although they did concede he was guilty of other killings. They noted that the only evidence that linked him to the murder was the confession he had recanted by the time he went to trial. Three of the eleven men who were exonerated from death row were said to have confessed—Gary Gauger, Rolando Cruz, and Alejandro Hernandez. The lawyers argued that Kokoraleis’s confession didn’t match the facts of the crime and that the results of a polygraph showed Kokoraleis was truthful when he said police beat him before he confessed.
Meanwhile, police, prosecutors, and victims’ rights advocates were calling loudly for Kokoraleis to be put to death. And at the same time, I was getting a lot of pressure from the religious community to stop the execution, mostly led by Reverend Demetrios Kantzavelos, a Greek Orthodox priest (and later a bishop), who was the chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Chicago.
Reverend Kantzavelos had become Kokoraleis’s spiritual advisor and taken up Kokoraleis’s cause after Kokoraleis reembraced his Greek Orthodox faith in prison. Reverend Kantzavelos had been joined by Cardinal Francis George, the head of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Reverend Kantzavelos was loudly urging that I delay the execution to allow a comprehensive study of the death penalty system.
I also had been reading studies. Lots of them. Pete Peters, who at the time was one of my oldest friends and a trusted advisor, was responsible for a growing mound of independent evidence on my desk aimed at convincing me that I ought to commute Kokoraleis’s sentence and place a moratorium on the entire death penalty in Illinois.
In June of 1998, for example, the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, DC, released a report entitled, The Death Penalty in Black and White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides. The study synthesized the research of three legal scholars and showed that evidence of racism against African Americans in the administration of the death penalty was less myth than reality and could be quantified with statistics. The report cited research of capital cases in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and found that the odds of receiving a death sentence were four times higher for African Americans than for white defendants after they were convicted of similar crimes. The center’s report also pointed to a study that found that across the country, 98 percent of the chief prosecutors at the county level—state’s attorneys, district attorneys, and similar positions—were white.
“The decisions about who lives and who dies are being made along racial lines by a nearly all-white group of prosecutors,” the report concluded.
Peters stressed over and over that all I had to do was take a close look at the list of the eleven men who had served time while locked up on death row for crimes they did not commit—lifetimes wasted because of the errors of others. That list, he insisted, was proof enough that something was wrong with the death penalty in Illinois.
I instructed one of my aides to prepare a document that would grant Kokoraleis a ninety-day stay of execution. I wanted it ready should that be my decision. I had been saying that I was giving some thought to the idea of not signing the death warrant for Kokoraleis. I said several times, “I can’t put someone to death.”
This was causing a great stir among my assistants and staff. More than one person responded by saying, “You’re not putting anyone to death, the legal system has determined his fate. You just have to get out of the way.”
Among my staff, Peters led the opposition to Kokoraleis’s execution. Pete was a former state legislator from Chicago and we had been allies on many issues and in many debates over the years. Pete was urging me to use the Kokoraleis case to send a larger message to the world about the injustice of capital punishment. The crimes committed by Kokoraleis were secondary, he maintained.
Among those leading the charge for execution was my chief counsel, Diane Ford. As deputy counsel when my predecessor, Jim Edgar, was governor, she had advised him on death penalty issues. Ten of the eleven executions since Illinois reinstated the death penalty had occurred under Edgar’s watch—all conducted after he signed their death warrants and stood back as the executions were carried out. Ford, who had followed the Kokoraleis case as it wound its way through the complicated appeals system, had the support of Dave Urbanek, my press secretary and a former newspaper reporter, who as a journalist had written several news stories about the appellate challenges brought by Gecht, Spreitzer, and the Kokoraleis brothers. In their opinion, Kokoraleis had earned the death penalty.
Mediating the debate, as always in my office, was my chief of staff, Robert Newtson. Bob had been with me in various positions for more than twenty years, dating back to my days in the House of Representatives. Bob had always been a rock for me. He always told me what I needed to hear, whether I wanted to hear it or not. Bob told me he believed Kokoraleis was a very bad guy. But he also encouraged the discussion and debate to help me sort through things.
I have always liked to hear others talk about the issues, whether it was something facing the state or matters that affected my administration. Throughout my life, I probably spent most of every working day talking with people, either in person or on the telephone. The debate over Kokoraleis was no different. There had been weeks of give-and-take.
And now, it was coming to a head during this conference call. There was concern about how I would position myself if I signed the death warrant in light of all the exonerations of death row prisoners. Everyone there knew I was conflicted about what to do. And everyone had their own ideas about what to do. So, I let them talk.
“This is a chance to take a stand here that no other governor in this country has the guts to take—and you would be right,” Peters declared. “No one will blame you if you call this off. You’ll look like a hero.”
“He can still be that hero,” Newtson said. “Just not with this case. He can call a moratorium on all the other death sentences after this one if that’s what he wants to do. But if he allows this to go ahead, then he’ll have a certain amount of cover against the backlash from victims’ rights groups and everybody in the Republican Party who will call him a coward and wonder what happened to a guy who ran as a tough-on-crime candidate.”
“To hell with the Republican Party,” Peters said. “I’m telling you that the good will and support he’ll get from the clergy and from other quarters will more than make up for those guys. Half of them run the other way when they see their own shadow. I'm talking about taking the lead on a national issue.”
“But Pete, you’ve got to take the crime into account,” Newtson declared. “We have showed the case to some of the legislators in the House who are the biggest supporters of a death penalty moratorium. They don’t want to touch this one. They don’t care. This guy is not their poster boy! They’re not going to go after George if Kokoraleis dies.”
The call ended without resolution.