Free Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow

circumstances under which a killer may die. Thus when Arnold Mireles, a community policing volunteer in Chicago, was killed in 1998 because of his confrontation with local landlords, the legislature made the murder of a community policing volunteer a capital offense.
    Moreover, one of the original eligibility factors, felony-murder, has ballooned as well. Prosecutors love felony-murder eligibility. For one thing, it provides an avenue to a capital sentence for a violent criminal with a long record whose crime might not otherwise qualify. It allows prosecutors to sentence defendants, rather than offenses. Beyond that, felony-murder is often easier to prove than other qualification factors. The evidence that a defendant was committing an armed robbery is far more clear-cut than whether he was attempting to torture his victim with a pistol-whipping. Thus, a full 60 percent of the prisoners on Illinois’ death row had arrived there thanks to felony-murder eligibility, albeit often in the company of more particular criteria.
    Yet felony-murder always struck me as a logical mess. Why should a murder in the course of a rape be death-eligible, if the same defendant could rape a woman one day and murder her for laughs the next without facing death? Does timing really make the crime any graver? More important, felony-murder by its nature aims at crimes that started out with another purpose. Aren’t long-contemplated murders more aggravated than murders committed on impulse, like Thomas’s?
    These thoughts had not stopped the Illinois legislature, which had continued adding forcible crimes to the list of felony-murders punishable by death until they numbered sixteen. This statutory breadth vests prosecutors with great discretion about whether to seek the death penalty, and experience seems to teach that uncabined discretion, exercised by 102 different State’s Attorneys, will inevitably lead to unfair results.
    Chris Thomas was on death row, therefore, because of questionable legislative judgments. But in the legal system, like the rest of life, there is usually more than one reason something goes awry. Thomas, as is true of many others, was also on death row for the crime of having the wrong lawyers. He had been defended by two local private attorneys who had entered into a contract with the Lake County Public Defender’s Office that paid them $30,000 per year to defend 103 cases, an average of less than $300 per matter. By contract, one assignment had to be a capital case. Ordinarily, a Deputy Public Defender experienced in capital defense was assigned with the contract lawyer, but the fiscal year was nearly over, and neither of the contract attorneys had done the required capital case, so they were assigned to the matter together. One of them had never had any role in a death penalty case; the other had only been standby counsel when Alton Coleman, already under the Ohio death sentence that led to his execution in 2002, had defended himself.
    As I worked with Brett Hart and another of my partners, John Koski, our strategy was to characterize Thomas’s defense in court as all you would expect for $600. In light of Chris’s confessions, his trial lawyers had seemed to regard the case as a clear loser at trial and, given the impulsive nature of the murder, virtually certain to result in a sentence other than death. They did a spare investigation of Thomas’s background for the inevitable sentencing hearing, an effort that was also hindered by the fact that the chief mitigation witness, Thomas’s aunt, the closest thing to an enduring parental figure in his life, had herself been prosecuted on a drug charge by one of Chris’s lawyers during his years as an Assistant State’s Attorney. Chris’s aunt distrusted her nephew’s attorneys, and under her influence, Thomas soon did as well. He felt screwed around already, since he’d confessed to the crime, expressed remorse, and was