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Assembly votes thumbs down on death penalty, ConConThe ISBA Assembly dealt with two major public affairs issues – abolition of capital punishment and calling a Constitutional Convention – during its June 27 meeting in St. Louis. After extensive debate and thorough explication of death penalty downsides by past president Terrence K. Hegarty and Thomas P. Sullivan, chair of the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, Assembly members voted 82 to 38 to support legislation to abolish the death penalty. Several judges in the policy-setting body abstained. Later in the meeting, the Assembly voted to oppose the November ballot question about calling an Illinois Constitutional Convention to be convened in 2010. Hegarty had called the death penalty “racist, arbitrary and based on politics and geography,” and said the ISBA should have a “strong interest in not executing innocent men.” In Sullivan’s opinion, the system seems capricious. “Killing killers to stop killing doesn’t work,” he said, and never has in history. A contrary opinion was provided by DuPage County State’s Attorney Joseph E. Birkett, president of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association. Birkett pointed out that guidelines on capital punishment are working, although the death penalty would be a more effective deterrent “if we could speed up the process.” He said that “monsters” should be sentenced to death and the sentence carried out. “The people on Death Row now are indisputably guilty,” he assured. Opposition to capital punishment was also voiced by retiring ISBA president Joseph G. Bisceglia and incoming President Jack C. Carey. Bisceglia stated his view that the death penalty is “absolutely not a deterrent. The issue is vengeance,” he said, adding that it is too much responsibility to place on a state’s attorney. Carey quoted from a dissent by retired Illinois Supreme Court justice Moses W. Harrison II in the 1998 ruling in People v. Bull that “when a system is as prone to error as ours is, we should not be making irrevocable decisions about any human life.” The subject of the death penalty was placed on the Assembly agenda by Letitia “Tish” Spunar Sheats, a Laureate of the ISBA Academy of Illinois Lawyers in addition to serving on the Assembly. After the decision of the ISBA Assembly was announced publicly, an editorial in The State Journal Register of Springfield commended members for taking a strong and decisive stand. “We applaud the ISBA’s aggressive new stance,” the editorial concluded. “It’s our hope that its position will stimulate serious discussion in the Statehouse about doing away with capital punishment in Illinois for good.”
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