SR0260 96TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

SR0260 LRB096 12471 RLC 25489 r

SENATE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, In January of 2000, former Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in Illinois; before the moratorium, 13 death row inmates were exonerated and found innocent of the crime for which they were originally sentenced to death; and

WHEREAS, Since 2000, 6 more death row inmates have been exonerated and found innocent of the crime for which they were originally sentenced to death; most recently, Nathson Fields was acquitted on April 8, 2009; the current number of exonerations in Illinois is 19, and Illinois is second only to Florida in number of exonerations from death row; and

WHEREAS, There is no safeguard that an innocent person would not be put on death row; the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment formed by Governor Ryan in 2000 to study the death penalty in Illinois concluded that "no system, given human nature and frailties, could ever be devised or constructed that would work perfectly and guarantee absolutely that no innocent person is ever again sentenced to death"; and

WHEREAS, Despite the implementation of reforms to Illinois' death penalty system by both the Illinois General Assembly and the Illinois Supreme Court, there remains no sufficient safeguard against additional innocent persons being convicted of murder and sentenced to death; and

WHEREAS, The death penalty is not a deterrent; in the last twenty years, states with the death penalty have a higher murder rate than states which do not; in Illinois, Cook County, the county with the highest murder rate, has also committed the most people to death row with no apparent effect on homicides; in fact, the murder rate in Illinois has gone down since the moratorium on executions has been in place; and

WHEREAS, The cost of the death penalty is prohibitive; the average cost of a trial in a federal death case is about 8 times that of a federal murder case in which the death penalty is not sought; every state that has done a cost study has found death penalty cases cost millions to hundreds of millions more than non-death cases, including cases in which the defendant receives life without parole; and

WHEREAS, The State of Illinois can no longer afford to waste its scarce resources on the death penalty; and

WHEREAS, The Cook County Public Defender routinely depletes its annual funds to pay for capital cases before the end of the fiscal year, and without the funds, the office is unable to pay for the help of expert witnesses, as well as the other additional costs of a death penalty case; the Cook County Public Defender's 2009 allotment of $1.75 million was exhausted this month, in large part because 60 percent of the money went to cover unpaid bills from 2008; and

WHEREAS, The State's budget for Fiscal Year 2009 includes $10,642,100 for the Capital Litigation Trust Fund, created by the General Assembly in 2000; the Governor's proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2010 includes $11,642,100 for the Fund; over the past 6 fiscal years, the Fund has been allocated just under $89 million; nevertheless, the Fund's expenditures account for only part of the true cost of maintaining capital punishment in Illinois - a cost that is difficult to estimate without conducting an expensive and comprehensive cost study; and

WHEREAS, A cost study done in the State of New Jersey found the death penalty has cost New Jersey taxpayers $253 million more than the costs that would have been incurred in a system with a maximum sentence of life without parole; the study examined the costs of death penalty cases to prosecutor offices, public defender offices, courts, and correctional facilities, and the report's authors wrote that the cost estimate is "very conservative" because other significant costs uniquely associated with the death penalty were not available and, "from a strictly financial perspective, it is hard to reach a conclusion other than this: New Jersey taxpayers over the last 23 years have paid more than a quarter billion dollars on a capital punishment system that has executed no one," the report concluded; since 1982, there have been 197 capital trials in New Jersey and 60 death sentences imposed, of which 50 were subsequently reversed; there have been no executions, and 10 men are housed on the death row; Michael Murphy, former Morris County prosecutor, remarked: "If you were to ask me how $11 million a year could best protect the people of New Jersey, I would tell you by giving the law enforcement community more resources; I'm not interested in hypotheticals or abstractions, I want the tools for law enforcement to do their job, and $11 million can buy a lot of tools"; and

WHEREAS, Death penalty cases are more expensive at every stage of the judicial process than similar non-death cases; death penalty cases cost more to try, hear, appeal and incarcerate than non-death cases; a new study in the State of Maryland released by the Urban Institute on March 6, 2008 forecasted that the lifetime expenses of capitally-prosecuted cases since 1978 will cost Maryland taxpayers $186 million; the study estimates that the average cost to Maryland taxpayers for reaching a single death sentence is $3 million - $1.9 million more than the cost of a non-death penalty case; the study examined 162 capital cases that were prosecuted between 1978 and 1999 and found that those cases cost $186 million more than what those cases would have cost had the death penalty not existed as a punishment; at every phase of a case, according to the study, capital murder cases cost more than non-capital murder cases; the 106 cases in which a death sentence was sought but not handed down in Maryland cost the state an additional $71 million and those costs were incurred simply to seek the death penalty even though the ultimate outcome was a life or long-term prison sentence; and

WHEREAS, There is broad support for abolition of the death penalty internationally; 137 out of 194 countries worldwide have abolished the death penalty by law or in practice, including almost all industrialized western democracies, and most recently Uzbekistan and Argentina; no nation can become a member of the European Economic Union without first abolishing capital punishment; nations that have abolished the death penalty include Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, Rwanda, Costa Rica and Ireland; according to a recent Amnesty International report, the United States in 2008 had a higher execution rate last year than Pakistan and is ranked the fourth highest executioner on the planet, behind only China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia and ahead of Pakistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and North Korea; 93% of the world's executions are carried out by the United States, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan; of the 59 countries which still have the death penalty, only 25 carried out executions last year; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we support the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois.