Program puts death penalty on trial

ILLINOIS:

Program puts death penalty on trial

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan spoke to a crowd of about 550 DePaul faculty
and students in late November
during a keynote discussion on the state of the death penalty and
discussed why, as governor, he decided to impose a moratorium.


Elliot Slosar, a senior majoring in political science and president of the
DePaul chapter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, organized the
event-the first for the chapter, which Slosar founded in May 2006.

"I didn't think that we'd be able to get Gov. Ryan," he admits. But Slosar
ended up working closely with the former governor. "It was really surreal
to build a relationship with somebody like that. Without Gov. Ryan, the
death penalty would still be a pretty stagnant issue."

Ryan was joined by Madison Hobley and Andrea Lyon. Hobley spoke about
spending 16 years on Illinois' death row after being wrongly accused of
setting a 1987 fire that killed 7 people, including his wife and son.
Lyon, who helped organize the event, is a professor in the College of Law
and director of DePaul's Center for Justice in Capital Cases, which
represented Hobley in his bid to gain clemency.

"I hope this helped put a human face on this issue and that there's some
sense that the police aren't always right and mistakes do get made," says
Lyon. "This could happen to you, and you should worry about criminal
justice issues."

Ryan, Hobley and Lyon also addressed the politics of capital punishment
and the impact on states determining which guilty defendants deserve to
live and which deserve to die.

"If we're serious about trying to do something to reform our criminal
justice system, we have to continue to have real conversations," Lyon
says. "It's important that the conversation not end with the moratorium.
We still have a death penalty, and we still have abuses in the criminal
justice system."

A screening of the documentary film "Race to Execution" followed the
discussion. The film, which is scheduled to air on public television March
27, examines America's Program puts death penalty on trial criminal
justice system by probing how race plays a role in death sentencing. Also
highlighted are the stories of 2 men sentenced to die-one of them Hobley.

The evening concluded with a candlelight vigil at which parents of 2
former death row inmates spoke. Those inmates' lives were spared when Ryan
imposed the death penalty moratorium in January of 2003.

The program was co-sponsored by the Political Science Department and the
DePaul chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Amnesty
International.

(source: Media-Newswire)