Capital punishment in Illinois

Capital punishment was a legal form of punishment in the U.S. state of Illinois until 2011 when it was abolished.

History

Initially, Illinois used death by hanging as a form of execution. The last person executed by this method was Charles Birger and was done publicly. In 1928, the electric chair was substituted for death by hanging. After being struck down by Furman v. Georgia in 1972, the death penalty was reinstated in Illinois on July 1, 1974 but voided by the Supreme Court of Illinois in 1975. Illinois officially reinstated the death penalty on July 1, 1977. Lethal injection was adopted in the state in 1990, but the electric chair remained operational in Illinois to replace lethal injection, if needed, which never happened.

Illinois was until 2003 a state like others where the death penalty was restored, over 170 people had been convicted and 12 were executed in the 1990s (5 in 1995).

In 1998, Anthony Porter escaped execution at nearly 50 hours on the basis of its inability to understand the meaning of the sentence of his IQ and then, shortly after, released on the basis of evidence gathered by a team of journalism students; this switching, preceded and followed by other (20 in total), was born doubts about the state's judicial system. On 11 January 2003 the Republican Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of 167 condemned to death in life sentences or, 3 of them in 40 years, a gesture that his opponents attribute to the fact that he was rendered ineligible by his unpopularity and charged with conspiracy, racketeering and fraud.

14 people were sentenced to death and many reforms have been undertaken, notably under the leadership of Senator Barack Obama has passed a law requiring police to videotape interrogations in capital cases.

Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation on March 9, 2011 to abolish the death penalty in Illinois to go into effect July 1, 2011, and commuted the death sentences of the fifteen inmates on Illinois' death row to life imprisonment.

Capital crimes

The following were capital crimes in the state of Illinois:

• First-degree murder with aggravating factors
• Aggravated kidnapping
• Treason

See also

• List of people executed in Illinois
• List of most recent executions by jurisdiction
• List of wrongful convictions in the United States
• List of exonerated death row inmates
• List of death row inmates in the United States