Free Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Page A

rewarded for his contrition by being put on trial for his life. By the time of trial, Thomas was at war with his lawyers. He refused to discuss a guilty plea, and after he was convicted, he took the stand in his sentencing hearing to deny he committed the crime, notwithstanding his many prior confessions. Infuriated, Judge Charles Scott, who’d never sentenced anybody to death before, gave Christopher Thomas the death penalty. So the dominoes fell.
    Since the time Chris’s case was tried in 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court and the state legislature have taken several steps aimed at guaranteeing a competent defense in a death penalty trial. A Capital Litigation Trust Fund has been established to pay lawyers and experts, and the Illinois Supreme Court has created a Capital Litigation bar, with specific experiential requirements that both prosecutors and defenders must meet before they may try a death case.
    Yet those changes do nothing to address the more fundamental problem of how prosecutors choose when to seek the death penalty. Looking over the roughly 270 reported opinions in Illinois capital cases, I was struck again and again by how random it all seemed: there were many monstrous crimes, but also a number of so-called garden-variety murders.
    When the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 in Furman , the prevailing reason among the majority was because there was virtually no logic to who was being selected for execution and who wasn’t. Legislatures and courts have spent the quarter century since capital punishment was restored attempting to establish more exacting guidelines and procedures, but the results are still wildly inconsistent. When Alstory Simon pled guilty to the double murder for which Anthony Porter was once nearly executed, Simon was sentenced to thirty-seven years. Chris Thomas was on death row, but other Lake County murderers whose crimes seemed far graver had escaped it, including one man who’d killed four persons; another who’d knocked his friend unconscious, then placed him on the tracks in front of an oncoming train; and a mother who’d fed acid to her baby. Where’s the moral proportion in that?
    Nor are the inequities that emerge in case-to-case comparisons the only troubling disparities in the application of the death penalty. Race, whose effect in capital cases is often misunderstood, provides an example of continued differential treatment. We commissioned Mike Radelet and Glenn Pierce, two leading death penalty researchers, to determine if there was any evidence that race played a part in who had been sentenced to death in Illinois since 1977. There was indeed a race effect, it turned out, but not what popular beliefs might suggest. In Illinois, according to the available records, roughly 70 percent of the persons convicted and sentenced for first-degree murder have been black (as have been more than 60 percent of the victims) and about 17 percent of the killers have been white (and about 25 percent of the victims). Once convicted, however, white murderers were sentenced to death at a rate two and one half times that for black murderers. The reason? One seems to be that the death penalty is given more frequently in the largely white, rural parts of the state. Also, in a racially divided society, whites are more likely to associate with, and thus to murder, someone white, and that—choosing a white victim—turns out to be the controlling variable. Killing a white person made a murderer three and a half times more likely to be punished with a death sentence than if he’d killed someone black.
    The figures showing that death sentences are meted out far more often for murdering whites than for murdering blacks may be mitigated by various factors. Juries tend to engage in an unspoken calculation of the harm of a murder. No one would be surprised to see otherwise identical murders result in the death penalty when the victim was