Here in Illinois a few years ago a group of students from Northwestern helped to exonerate the Ford Heights Four…read below info, this is one of the reasons why there is now a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois now.
Dieter says the fact that eight of the nine men were freed after intervention from outside forces suggests that Illinois has an unusually active and resourceful community of legal crusaders willing to do pro bono work and investigations. Nationally, about 1 percent of Death Row inmates are found to be innocent. But Dieter adds that if other states had resources like Illinois', that percentage would probably rise.
Outside intervention certainly played a crucial role in last year's well-publicized release of the Ford Heights Four, two of whom - Williams and Jimerson - were sentenced to death. The men were convicted of murder and ---- in 1978 after a recently engaged Caucasian couple were found dead in a predominantly African-American section of Chicago. It took private investigators, a Northwestern University journalism professor and his students to get a statement from a witness saying she had lied due to police pressure. In addition, they obtained confessions from the men who had actually committed the crime. The confessions were then corroborated with DNA testing.
Advocates and lawyers are quick to point out that exonerations like those of the Ford Heights Four are far from examples of the justice system working.
"It would be one thing if we could say the system works, and that individuals followed procedures and were found innocent, but in fact in all the cases it was really a fluke," says state Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Evanston), who with six other legislators is sponsoring a bill to amend the Illinois Criminal Code to suspend executions for one year. "We find persistent wrongdoing on the part of law enforcement. It's really sheer luck that those convicted of these crimes were exonerated in the end."
In the case of the Ford Heights Four, police learned who the real killers were just days after the fact, but police "deep-sixed the information because they had already gone about their frame and couldn't possibly expose it at that point," says Lawrence Marshall, a Northwestern law professor who participated in the cases of five of the nine men released.
The political force the death penalty has is unequaled in the criminal justice system. In Illinois, critics charge the justice system in big counties like Cook of being far too political, and say some of those within the system look at it as nothing more than a political stepping stone. Going for and getting the death penalty in well-publicized cases looks good to most constituents. Currently, the mayor of Chicago, attorney general, and a former governor are all former state's and district attorneys, and a current U.S. attorney is rumored to be planning a run for political office. "If you want to take politics out of it," says Marshall, "you have to do something about the fact that it's become a political office instead of a professional office."
Ky Henderson is a writer in Chicago
