People should look at reality, not theory of capital punishment

Frank is a third-year psychobiology student.

By Michael Frank

“But Mr. Tillis, if all aspects of a trial are conducted
fairly, if the defendant is proven without a shred of doubt to be
guilty of the crime for which he was charged ““ couldn’t
you then be in favor of the death penalty”?

That question coming from a UCLA student in the audience sounded
familiar enough, and by the look on Darby Tillis’ face, I
could tell he had heard it before. Darby Tillis ““ sent to
death row for a crime he did not commit ““ attained fame for
being one of two men to be tried more times than any other
defendant in the history of the United States (five times ““
three by hung juries).

Tillis was convicted in the third of those trials by a judge who
was himself later convicted of taking bribes in criminal cases and
is now serving 15 years in prison. Tillis was finally set free on
Jan. 21, 1987, after being incarcerated for nine years, one month
and 16 days.

The question asked by the student seemed to represent everything
meaningful at the heart of the death penalty debate: the debate
between the theory and the reality.

On the theory side are the death penalty supporters, those
idealists among us who still believe all murderers should be
executed and that the Sixth Amendment both protects and justifies
their righteous position. The amendment states that “the
accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an
impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall
have been committed “¦ to have compulsory process for
obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of
Counsel for his defence”.

This, of course, sounds wonderful on paper. The Bill of Rights,
however, represents only the most idealized notion of American
jurisprudence. Tillis’ case is just one example of the
accused not receiving an impartial jury, witnesses obtained in his
favor nor the assistance of initial adequate counsel for his
defense.

But let’s ask the tough questions that make the idealists
squirm: how does a system so perfectly designed to work send 90
innocent people to death row? That comes out to one innocent person
released for every eight executed since 1973. In fact, in a
previous Viewpoint column, Andrew Jones phrased this point even
better: “how did these poor slobs slip through the cracks for
all these years”? (“Death penalty functions to preserve
just society,” Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, Feb. 8). Jones said it
himself, they were “poor.”

Quick death penalty fact: If you can afford good legal
representation, you won’t end up on death row.
(www.nodeathpenalty.org). Make a note of that because it is the one
factor that unites all death row prisoners across race and gender.
Tillis was not a rich man at the time of his arrest and he is just
one of 13 freed death-row inmates in Illinois, a state in which
more death-row prisoners have been exonerated than have been
executed since capital punishment was reinstituted in 1976.

His case was typical of all the others ““ railroaded for an
unsolved high-profile crime by a combination of corrupt cops,
prosecutors and judges, all working within a system which sometimes
pursues convictions more intensely than it pursues justice.

Think about the way the system is designed to work
“efficiently” and remember how disasters like the LAPD
Rampart scandal came about. Or consider the 20 years of
well-documented police torture under Commander Jon Burge in
Chicago’s Area 2 that forced “confessions,” which
led to at least 13 more shaky death penalty convictions (there are
12 of them still on death row ““ one, Frank Bounds, died of
untreated cancer ““ and they originally organized to call
themselves the Death Row 10).

City and state attorneys get elected and re-elected for a
reason: they have a proven track record that is tough on crime.
Then, if they have avoided or stifled enough unpleasant
controversy, they become judges, legislators or even mayor. This is
exactly the formula that worked for current mayor of Chicago
Richard M. Daley. He was the state’s attorney who extended
Tillis’ time spent on death row between his fourth and fifth
trials.

Likewise, the reason the Death Row 10 continue to sit on death
row long after Commander Burge was dismissed in disgrace (although
with full pension) is that former prosecutor Daley’s
right-hand man, Richard Devine, was subsequently elected
state’s attorney of Cook County. It might also be worth
noting that Devine worked for the same law office that defended
Burge during the police department’s internal affairs
division investigation in 1990.

So believe in the conspiracy because it most certainly exists.
The corruption exposed, and the death penalty moratorium in
Illinois that came about because of it, were not the results of the
natural processes of the judicial system nor were they the effects
of Governor George Ryan.

Grassroots organizations like the Campaign to End the Death
Penalty had to force the hand of the power brokers within the state
of Illinois. After all, it took 13 men to walk away from death row
for the conservative Governor Ryan to finally get the hint that
something was horribly wrong.

Change always occurs as a result of sufficient grassroots
organization. The brief period (1972-1976) in which the Supreme
Court held that the scheme of capital punishment under the statute
was “cruel and unusual” and violated the Eighth
Amendment occurred as a result of a case-by-case campaign waged by
the NAACP.

As noted historian Howard Zinn said, “Courts don’t
do enlightened things on their own “¦ (they) do enlightened
things when something has happened in the society, when movements
have been created.”

The Supreme Court did not hold out long, however, bringing back
the death penalty with a 5-4 vote in 1976. The implications of that
one swing vote has resulted in 715 more executions to date, but the
tide may be shifting back again.

The moratorium in Illinois enacted by conservative Republican
Governor Ryan is just the beginning. There is currently a de facto
moratorium in Georgia, along with moratorium legislation proposed
in Maryland, Texas and a majority of other capital punishment
states.

Timothy McVeigh, however, is the last death penalty supporter
trump card. When all else fails, the idealists will come at you
with how the death penalty is necessary for those run-of the-mill
death-row monsters like McVeigh (you know, the ones that typically
kill 168 people).

David Drucker’s column (“Victims, not murderers,
deserve compassion,” Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, May 24) missed a
very simple point: death row abolitionists do not condone the
actions of this monster, they instead look closer to see the
significance of his case for what it is. He is a poster boy for all
the reasons the powers that be would like to justify continuing
with capital punishment.

On another note, Drucker also mentioned the story of one of the
Oklahoma City victims, Julie Welch, as more justification for the
families of the victims to exact their final vengeance against
McVeigh. He cited Julie’s father, Bud Welch, expressing his
immense grief on CNN (“Julie Welch will never see her
future,” CNN, April 27, 1995), yet must have overlooked Mr.
Welch also saying:

“With the exception of McVeigh and maybe one or two
others, we only kill the easy ones in this country. And by easy
ones, I mean the poor ones.” Bud Welch, the father of Julie
Welch, is the one calling the McVeigh execution “a staged
political event,” and he is not the only one (Socialist
Worker, May 27, 2001).

We should never forget that the greatest gift mankind has to
share is compassion ““ for the victims, the victims’
families, the guilty and the wrongly accused. Tillis and his
co-defendant Percy Cobb have not been compensated by the state of
Illinois since their release some 14 years ago.

Darby didn’t answer that student’s question with the
simple “yes” or “no” that was probably
expected. We don’t live in theory, we live in reality, with
circumstances that make the easy “yes” or
“no” impossible.

In order to begin to understand Darby’s reality we must
acknowledge the complexity of the way that capital punishment is
administered in the United States. The system is far from perfect,
it is in fact broken ““ Governor Ryan said so himself. A hero
like Tillis deserves more than just our respect, more than just our
sympathy and even more than just our compassion. He deserves
more.