This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 19, 2011 - On Gov. Patrick Quinn's desk sits a bill banning executions, passed by the Illinois House and Senate this month. While the state has had a moratorium on executions since 2000, currently 15 prisoners are on death row.
If Quinn signs the bill, Illinois would become the 16th state to ban executions. Michigan did it first, banning executions 163 years ago. On Wednesday, Quinn told an audience at the University of Illinois, according to a report in KWQC 6 News, that he would like to hear from the people of Illinois before he decides whether to sign the bill.
In 2010, the United States had 46 executions -- a 12 percent decrease from the previous year, and about half as many as the 98 executions in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a 20-year-old nonprofit in Washington.
Last week, outgoing Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, commuted the sentence of a man on its death row, giving him life in prison without parole. Also, last week Pennsylvania's outgoing Gov. Edward Rendell, a Democrat, urged his state's general assembly to consider replacing the death penalty with life without parole. His state has not had an execution since 1999.
Earlier this month, outgoing Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, also a Democrat, granted a posthumous pardon to Joe Arridy, who was executed for a murder in 1936. The pardon acknowledged that Arridy was innocent.
Missouri has 52 convicts on death row -- one fewer than last week when Gov. Jay Nixon commuted the sentence of Richard Clay to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Nixon said he still believed in the death penalty.
It was the first time clemency had been granted in Missouri since Jan. 27, 1999, when Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan granted Darrell Meese clemency the day after Pope John Paul II spoke to the governor at the St. Louis Cathedral Basilica. When later that spring the pope asked Carnahan to commute the much more controversial execution of a mentally retarded man, the governor refused. Three years later, in 2002, the Supreme Court banned executions of those with mentally retardation.
The Supreme Court followed with other curtailments of capital punishment. In 2005 it abolished capital punishment for juvenile offenders, overturning its own 1989 ruling that had upheld the death penalty for offenders as young as 16 and 17 years old. And in 2008, it threw out a law allowing those convicted of child rape to be executed.
Strong Support for Death Penalty Remains
Like the late pope, most main-line American religious leaders oppose the death penalty -- but not all. Mormons, Muslims and some evangelical Christians support executions.
Death-penalty proponents frequently say that executing the guilty is a matter of justice, and some cite Old Testament and religious traditions in their arguments, such as the ancient Judaic idea of an "eye for an eye." (Most Jewish religious leaders oppose the death penalty and don't use that ancient expression.)
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the nation's second largest Lutheran body, strongly upholds a government's right to use the death penalty. But its official statement adds that the church "has not taken the position that the government must use this right if it determines that some other form of punishment would better serve society at large at a particular time and place." The LCMS is headquarter in Kirkwood.
Among the general public, there is still a strong sentiment in favor of the death penalty. A Gallup poll on crime found in October that nearly two-thirds of Americans (64 percent) favor imposition of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, while 29 percent oppose it. This continues a trend that has shown little change over the past seven years.
But the issue is not a simple one. When given the choice between execution and life without parole, Gallup found a near statistical tie, with 48 percent for the death penalty and 46 percent for life without parole.
Recent polls indicate that a majority of voters in death penalty states are willing to support candidates who want to repeal capital punishment, assuming that those convicted of capital crimes would get life without chance of parole.
One local lawyer believes he can explain the evolution in thinking about the death penalty.
"I think the reason for a change in thinking is that so many men have been found innocent who were on death rows," said Charles Weiss. In 2009, Weiss successfully led a team of lawyers that proved Josh Kezer did not commit the murder for which he had served 16 years in Missouri prisons. Kezer walked free. Kezer was not on death row but if he had been, he might have been executed within those 16 years, Weiss said.
Since 1992, more than 250 inmates have been exonerated through DNA testing, including 17 who had been sentenced to death, said a spokesman for the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit, founded in 1992 at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in 1992.
The Clay Case
Despite repeated questions, Nixon, a Democrat, has not discussed publicly his reasons for commuting Clay's sentence.
Lawyer Steve Snodgrass says Clay's commutation makes sense, even for a death penalty supporter. In fact, Snodgrass wrote Nixon a letter endorsing the commutation. "I said it was unjust for the woman who ordered the murder of her husband to get 15 years when the man who may, or may not have, actually done the murder to got the death penalty."
Clay alleges he didn't murder Martindale.
"I told the governor that I was not opposed to the death penalty. I think it should be rare, vary rare," said Snodgrass, who worked on Weiss' team that freed Kezer. Snodgrass interviewed Clay, a witness in that case. "As long as we have humans we will have mistakes."
Beyond The Region
Even the mood in Texas, a state that has led the nations with the most executions, is changing. Dallas County has witnessed 21 exonerations in recent years, more DNA exonerations than any county in the nation, said Steve Hall, a former chief of staff to the Texas attorney general from 1983 to 1991. Hall now is director of the nonprofit Stand Down Texas, a death penalty information center. In Dallas County, its recently elected district attorney is working closely with the Innocence Project on old convictions.
"Even in Texas we are seeing major changes in the public's mood," he said.
Once the Texas Legislature passed a bill allowing the sentence of life imprisonment without parole, some Texans began to see that as an alternative to the death penalty.
"Under the old (Texas) law, life sentence always had the possibility of parole," Hall said. "A life sentence in Texas in the 1980s, when we didn't have enough prison capacity, meant revolving doors. Jurors knew that Texas released Kenneth Mac Duff and he went out and murdered again."
Now that juries understand that they can levy life imprisonment without parole, death sentences have fallen. Eight people were sentenced to death in 2010 in Texas. (In 2000, Texas, which led the nation in executions for many years, reached its apex with 40 executions.)
Twelve prisoners on Texas' death row have been exonerated in recent years.
In one famous case, in 2009, a New Yorker magazine writer David Grann found the evidence that exonerated Todd Cameron Willingham who had been convicted of an arson that killed his three daughters. Willingham had been executed in 2004. Grann's investigation was reprised with additional proofs in a PBS Frontline documentary "Death By Fire." Its experts concluded that the fire may not even have been an arson. In fact, Willingham was executed on evidence that was nothing more than "junk science."
Still, said Hall, Texas continues "to execute far more than any other state."
Some Texans are now calling for a moratorium on the death penalty to examine the issue, citing Illinois as its role model. If Quinn signs the bill, many more states may use the state as a role model. Marylanders, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians are among those watching Quinn carefully.
Patricia Rice is a freelance writer in St. Louis.