Last Death Penalty Post

I believe that the only move for Governor Ryan to make in this situation was to commute all of the death row inmates. In his speech he enlightened the general public about the unjust practices that are tied to the death penalty. The first thing that astonished me about his speech was when he talked about how half of the people on death row in the history of Illinois have been found innocent. The next thing that surprised me about the death penalty in Illinois was that the geography of where the accused is factors into the sentencing exponentially. A defendant for a first degree murder is five times more likely to get the death penalty in a rural suburb than in Cook County where Chicago is located.  The ultimate abolishment of the death penalty in Illinois was the right move to make by the Illinois legislation. Once this trend of abolishing the death penalty for the unjustness rather than for moral reasons, many states started to reconsider their current takes on the death penalty. With more and more statistics on innocence emerging, Illinois had no other choice to reconsider the death penalty. Multiple articles we read in class shed some light upon the innocence of death row inmates.  One of the articles about innocence stated, “Since 1973, at least 88 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged……Thus, for very seven people executed, we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted……When the cases were retried, over 80% of the defendants were not sentenced to death and 7% were completely acquitted.” In another packet received in class, it talked about the Trop v. Dulles case in 1958 where the Supreme Court ruled that the United States was an, “evolving standard of decency that marked the progress of a maturing society.” All of this evidence is pointing toward the same outcome, and that is to rethink and restructure the criminal justice system that dealt with capital punishment.