Ultimate Punishment Read Free

business or because they are angry and it gratifies them. In a normative sense, they are bad people—and they are going to stay that way, in most instances. My job as a prosecutor—and the sensible first response of society—was to make sure they didn’t do bad things again. And I could see that a sentence of death was the most certain means to accomplish that goal in extreme cases.
    Thus, if I’d had to trade places with Jeremy and ask a jury to condemn Hector Sanchez to death, I believed I could do it. I did not force myself to justify capital punishment, just as I did not routinely question the wisdom of the RICO statute or the mail fraud or securities laws it was my job to enforce. But I could follow the will of my community on the issue.
    The ten years I spent in the nineties on the defense side of capital cases taught me many cautionary lessons about the death penalty, but when Matt Bettenhausen called me about serving on the Commission, I still hung in a sort of ethical equilibrium, afraid to come down on either side of the question of whether capital punishment was actually right or wise. Many of the traditional arguments against capital punishment had little traction with me. I respect the religious views of persons who regard life as sacred, but I don’t want government action predicated on anybody’s religious beliefs. The simple principle that says “If killing is wrong, then the state shouldn’t do it” has always struck me as just that—simple, too simple for the complexities of human conduct. Besides, it would also bar certain state violence I accept as a necessity—war or the use of lethal force when called for by police. Nor was I moved by those who denounce the death penalty as revenge, which pretends that getting even isn’t one of the motives for putting criminals in prison. How else to explain the stark conditions of American penitentiaries? On the other hand, I had a hard time defining what good came of capital punishment.
    When people asked, I referred to myself as a death penalty agnostic. Every time I thought I was prepared to stake out a position, something would drive me back in the other direction. In 1994, while I was representing Hernandez and had seen how wrong capital cases could go, John Wayne Gacy was scheduled for execution. In the late 1970s, Gacy, a contractor and part-time children’s-party clown, had raped and murdered approximately thirty-three young men, many of them teenagers, whom he had enticed to his home. According to the accounts of the few survivors, Gacy spent hours practicing tortures straight from Sade on his victims, repeatedly bringing them to the point of death until they finally succumbed, after which Gacy buried their corpses in the crawl space beneath his house. When the death penalty activists, who took me as an ally because of my work on Alex’s case, asked me to join their protests of Gacy’s execution, I refused. I could not call putting John Wayne Gacy to death an injustice.
    By taking a place on the Commission, I knew I would finally have to decide what I would do about capital punishment if I were, in the favorite law school phrase, “czar of the universe.” Paul Simon, the former U.S. Senator who was one of our co-chairs and a longtime foe of the death penalty, served notice at the threshold that before our labors were completed, he intended to call the question of whether Illinois should have capital punishment. As a lawyer, I was accustomed to working on matters one case at a time. Now I would have to pass judgment on an entire system, cast a vote, and give the people of Illinois my best advice, for whatever it was worth. No more dodging my conscience, no more mouthing liberal pieties while secretly hoping some conservative showed up to talk hard-nosed realities. The omen of that day of decision would, for me, loom over the whole enterprise. I was going to have to decide.

3
GOVERNOR GEORGE