In April, I was back on the road, talking about the moratorium and the death penalty. I was honored to be asked to speak and I was eager to tell my story. First up was a visit to the West Coast. UCLA School of Law was the initial stop and Pepperdine University School of Law was next—sandwiched around visits to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.
At UCLA, I told the law students:
Since I declared the moratorium last year, I have received more attention around the world than I ever imagined. I’ve received awards for courage. In fact, tonight, I am receiving the Act of Courage Award from Mike Farrell’s Death Penalty Focus Group. I don’t know that courage is the best word to describe what I did. I just call it doing the right thing.
That is why I wanted to come here to speak with you. You are law students. You’ve been very fortunate and you have tremendous opportunity before you. Someday you will be lawyers. Some of you will try cases as prosecutors or defense lawyers. Some of you may become law professors. Even others may become lobbyists or elected officials.
But you also have an obligation. Because someday, you may find yourself representing a man or woman accused of a capital crime—facing the death penalty. Maybe you will be a prosecutor, seeking the death sentence for someone you’ve convicted.
Or perhaps you will find yourself in my situation.
Maybe you’ll be elected governor and have resting on your shoulders the enormous weight of having to decide whether a death row inmate should live or die. lt could happen. I’ll tell you I never thought I would be here today talking to you in this lecture.
I never thought I would be in the position of making life or death decisions. I had to make that decision once and then I came to learn the indisputable facts—that the administration of the death penalty in Illinois was just not fair and our record was shameful.
As I always did in these presentations, I told the story of Anthony Porter and how journalism students helped save his life and prove his innocence. I recounted my agonizing over my decision to allow the execution of Andrew Kokoraleis to go forward. And I reiterated my intention for the commission to study the system.
“Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent person is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate,” I declared. “I am comfortable knowing that I did the right thing.
“Someday you will no longer be living the life of a law student,” I said. “You will graduate, pass the bar—trust me, you will—and practice law. You owe it to your client and to the entire justice system to be engaged in the relentless, passionate search not for victory at all costs but for truth. Embrace that search. Engage in that quest for truth. And never, ever compromise it.”
My message the following day to Pepperdine law students was similar. I found these moments exciting—and worthwhile. I felt that I was delivering a message that people needed to hear about the death penalty, especially people who might be ambivalent about it—like I was for all those years.
The more I thought about this, I was concluding that our prisons were full of people whose cases probably should have a second look. In my travels, I was finding, not surprisingly, that most people felt that law and order comes first and that meant getting convictions and sentencing people to prison and to death. But I also discovered that the idea of the criminal justice system is abstract to most people. They don’t have to go to bed every night with the death penalty.
It really was impressive to be honored by Death Penalty Focus. Mike Farrell, in his personal invitation, said, “We’re aware that it is not easy in today’s political world to carefully examine issues and positions often characterized as unpopular, and the ability and willingness of a political leader to maintain a position of such integrity reassures, invigorates and energizes those who often tend to think they’re alone in the struggle for human dignity.”
He said that an important goal of Death Penalty Focus was to demonstrate in public events such as their awards dinner the “breadth and depth of the community of individuals committed to social progress through the advancement of human rights.” He added that my acceptance of the award would “lend great strength to the work of our organization and to the social justice movement as whole.”
Among others honored that night was Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church. Mahony had taken a stand earlier in opposition to the death penalty, saying, “This is a time for a new ethic—justice without vengeance. We cannot restore life by taking life. We cannot practice what we condemn. We cannot contain violence by using state violence. In this new century, we join with others in taking prophetic stand to end the death penalty.”
I couldn’t say I was ready to abolish the death penalty, but increasingly, I had an open mind to what people like Cardinal Mahony and Mike Farrell were saying.
In my speech that night I talked about courage and how there was nothing courageous about what I did. I had found myself at a fork in the road. I either had to let innocent people die or declare a moratorium—a decision I hoped anyone would have made.
“Courage,” I said, “is Nelson Mandela, a man who spent decades in prison, in harsh conditions, simply because he believed his people should be free and equal.
“Courage is to be exiled from your country for advocating for democracy, like President Kim of South Korea, who I met this year.
“Courage really describes the young men and women I have met and presented with awards for their acts of heroism as police officers or firefighters, running into burning buildings or putting themselves in harm’s way to protect us.
“Courage describes what it takes to endure being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to be killed by the state for a crime you did not commit, only to be exonerated at the eleventh hour—as we have done thirteen times in Illinois. That is a shameful record,” I said.
“There have been a few naysayers, but they are pretty easily drowned out when you hear the Colosseum in Rome has been illuminated in light in your honor,” I said.
Declaring the moratorium, I said, was not a courageous thing. “But I know as sure as I am standing here tonight that it is the right thing.”
Days later, I was on my way to Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. My speech to law students there was timely. The Connecticut legislature was debating a moratorium on the death penalty as well as a ban on executing mentally disabled defendants. I took the occasion to deliver a message: don’t kill someone unless you can be sure that person is guilty.
I was greeted as a hero, although I certainly didn’t feel like one. And back in Illinois, it didn’t take long before I wound up in the crosshairs of the media and Pate Philip, who increasingly was a personal nemesis.
In a speech at Loyola University in Chicago, I spoke candidly about my growing doubt about being able to support the death penalty even if the system was flawless. I said I didn’t know if I could personally throw the switch on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was scheduled to be executed at a federal prison in Indiana in June.
When a student asked if I could support a perfect death penalty system, I was honest. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still struggling with it.” I went on to say I couldn’t give the go-ahead to execute McVeigh, who I considered a terrible human being.
“He thought this thing out and went out and killed a whole bunch of people and said that children were collateral to the event and it didn’t matter,” I said. “He’s shown no remorse. I think there may be cause for the death penalty for a guy like him, but I don’t know.”
What I was trying to say was that while I thought McVeigh probably deserved to be executed, I was glad I didn’t have to be the one making the final decision.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Philip told the press that he would be willing to execute McVeigh if I didn’t have the courage to do so. “For this horrendous crime, I’ll pull the switch,” Philip said. “In case he hasn’t got the courage, I’ll volunteer.”
I am sure there were people more than a little gleeful at Philip’s cheap shot at me. I tried to make it clear it wasn’t about McVeigh. This was about my feeling that I couldn’t approve another execution. Period.
At the same time that the legislature was refusing to pass reform legislation, it was actually approving a bill which would potentially increase the number of people sentenced to death. The legislation would expand the death penalty law to allow death sentences to be imposed on people convicted of murder if the crime was committed as part of street gang activity. This was referred to as an “aggravating factor” that could qualify a murder conviction as eligible for the death penalty. Illinois already had twenty of these aggravating factors, one of the most expansive lists in the nation.
I came in for personal criticism from a different source in June when Will County Circuit Court judge Herman Hasse sentenced Timothy Cunningham to life in prison for killing his wife in 1999 and another twenty years in prison for the attempted murder of his wife’s stepfather.
“If we can’t put serial killers or the murderers of police officers to death, how can we give it to someone who committed murder in a family situation?” Hasse asked and went on to question whether I had the authority to halt executions.
“I don’t think he does have the authority,” Hasse said. “As a result [of the moratorium], vicious killers who have been sentenced to death are sitting on death row today and their sentence is not being carried out. We need the state legislature, the state Supreme Court, and the governor to decide whether we are going to have death penalty or not.”
I was getting used to this kind of criticism and just put it to the side. As long as my commission was still meeting and taking testimony, I did not want to publicly respond and risk being interpreted as trying to influence the commission. Above all, I wanted the commission to be above reproach; to be fair and to come back with the best course of action—not for me—but for Illinois.
While I stayed quiet, others did not. Sensing that momentum was on their side after years of little, if any, success, death penalty opponents began talking publicly about their preferred option short of abolition: the need to commute all capital punishment convictions to life in prison. To them, it was the only viable option any governor had to deal with a broken system. They began voicing arguments that with such a high error rate among capital cases, the system’s fundamental flaws made any conviction under the existing rules at the least suspect and at the most, unjust.
What I didn’t know at the time was that earlier in the year, at the annual death penalty conference convened by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Airlie, Virginia, a group of Illinois lawyers, including Northwestern’s Larry Marshall, had met privately to discuss a plan to begin seeking commutations for death row prisoners—all of them. Soon, they would begin lobbying heavily for me to use my authority to empty death row.
The commission, to their credit, ignored the lobbying efforts that were pushing both sides of the issue. They were working to meet the expectations that I had set for it. I wasn’t pushing them, but in my heart, I was more than ready for them to go public.