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Some Final Comments
In January 2003, Illinois Governor George Ryan saved 163 men and four women on death row announcing:
"The facts that I have seen in reviewing each and every one of these cases raised questions not only about the innocence of people on death row, but about the fairness of the death penalty system as a whole. Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die."
"The Legislature couldn't reform it, lawmakers won't repeal it, and I won't stand for it - I must act. Because our three-year study has found only more questions about the fairness of the sentencing, because of the spectacular failure to reform the system, because we have seen justice delayed for countless death row inmates with potentially meritorious claims, because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral."
It overwhelmingly affects people of color and got the US Supreme Court (in Furman v. Georgia, 1972) to say:
"the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty....constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments," and, in how they're applied, so "harsh, freakish, and arbitrary" to be constitutionally unacceptable. The decision voided 40 death penalty statutes, thereby commuting the sentences of over 600 death row inmates nationally.
In 1976 (in Gregg v. Georgia, Jurek v. Texas, and Proffitt v. Florida, collectively called the Gregg decision), the High Court reinstated the death penalty and let states impose it. The Court held that new death penalty statutes in these states were constitutional under the Eighth Amendment, containing the cruel and unusual punishments clause that should effectively have prohibited it.
In Gregg v. Georgia, the Court held that the death penalty is not inherently cruel, but is "an extreme sanction, suitable to the most extreme of crimes."
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