Editorial: Politics, not reason, behind Rauner's death penalty gambit

The last person executed in Illinois was in 1999. The following year a moratorium was put in place and, eventually, in 2011, the death penalty was abolished here.

During all of that time, much debate ensued on whether the death penalty could be administered fairly. Former Govs. George Ryan, a Republican, and Pat Quinn, a Democrat, ultimately decided it couldn't. Staring them in the face was Illinois' shameful history: at the time of the moratorium, 13 people on Death Row were exonerated because of questions about their guilt. Another seven were exonerated before it was abolished. Many of those were suburban cases.

Yet, this year, after nearly four years in office, Gov. Bruce Rauner, who is facing a tough re-election battle, decided to finally weigh in on the death penalty debate - when no debate was in progress.

Last week, Rauner amended gun-control legislation by adding language that would reinstate the death penalty in mass murder cases and for those convicted of killing police officers. To apparently guard against cases that might come back to haunt him, he would change the standard for imposing the death penalty in cases where someone is found guilty "beyond all doubt" as opposed to "reasonable doubt.

How would that be determined? What is a mass killing? And why highlight police shootings? And why now? It's highly unlikely the Democrat-controlled General Assembly would allow Rauner's changes, even though they would support his gun-control measures.

And for good reason: There is no groundswell of support for reinstating the death penalty. It does not come up as a major issue in most statewide races anymore.

But beyond that, there has been no real change to ensure the imposition of the death penalty is done in a fair and accurate way.

Only when changes can be vetted and proven to work would it be OK to even consider such a move.

"Illinois' death penalty history showed how arbitrary and unreliable the death sentence was and how susceptible it was to official misconduct," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., in an Associated Press story last week. "Any suggestion that it should be brought back without a full public discussion and full public hearings is incredibly reckless."

And politically expedient.

The impact on the gun bill of the governor's death penalty insertion was not entirely clear Wednesday, especially after testimony by his staff to a House committee. But in any case, Rauner needs to find other topics to focus on as he seeks to repair his image in his own party while campaigning for another four-year term.