Yesterday Gov. Quinn signed the bill abolishing the death penalty in Illinois. This is my home state, and I thought I should comment about it. I am pleased that Quinn took the step and signed the bill. He had sat on it for many weeks. It had been reported that he was not anti-death penalty, and he stated upon signing it that it was the most difficult decision he had ever made in his life.

Quinn signing the bill has improved my opinion of him. While Illinois is not at all the first state to outlaw the death penalty, it is a major midwestern state, which do differ in their regional mores than coastal states such as California, Massachusettes, Vermont, or Oregon. In that regard, it is significant.

One of the ironies of this is that this will be the legacy of former Gov. George Ryan, who showed a lot of courage and vision to confront this issue when a college class from Northwestern University started independently researching death row cases in Illinois only to eventually discover that a couple dozen of the inmates scheduled for execution were innocent.

There's no doubt that innocent people have been executed by state governments in the US. That is intolerable in a society that is supposed to stress fairness, equality, and due process. But so often the least common denominator political winds of the moment trump our higher aspirations. This time, it didn't happen.

Quinn made a very thoughtful statement in which he said that after studying and consulting on the issue, he had concluded that the system was not good enough to guarantee that the execution of an innocent man remained a possibility, which was ultimately the deciding factor in his signing the ban into law.

Although it has been a long time ago, when I was a senior in HS (1970) I participated on a debate team. The subject that year was the death penalty, and I opposed the death penalty. I can still remember writing dozens of note cards with quotes from all kinds of sources which opposed the death penalty, even back then.

Some of the findings that I remember quite well are that studies have shown that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent, which is one of the proponents' main arguments. It is also very expensive to administer. There is a whole litany of arguments on both sides, but I think Quinn made the right decision, and I'm happy that he did.