The Chicago Tribune is on top of the death penalty and innocence issues this week in a forceful series of editorials. We recommend you read them all.

Today's editorial Disparities on Death Row calls for a centralized, statewide system of approving death penalty prosecutions and reviewing their results.

"According to the research, done for the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment, the decision to impose the death sentence spins not just on the depravity of the act or the place it occurred, but also on the race of the victim. In Illinois, a murder defendant is four times more likely to be sent to Death Row if his victim is white than if the victim is black."

...."To fully understand how the system is working in Illinois and to make sure death penalty is rooted in law rather than race, geography or any other extra-legal factor, how we deal with those who murder must be monitored through windows rather than keyholes."

Yesterday the Tribune highlighted the problems with eyewitness testimony in When Believing Isn't Seeing.

The editorial calls for police to conduct sequential rather than simultaneous lineups which research has shown dramatically reduces the number of false identfications, blind testing (where the person conducting the procedure does not know which one is the suspect) and videotaping or at least audiotaping an eyewitness's statement of how certain they are at the time they make their selection.

"Since the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment, 86 Death Row inmates across the nation have been exonerated based on claims of innocence. The convictions in more than half of those cases depended at least in part on eyewitnesses, according to a 2001 study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. In 33 of the cases, eyewitness testimony was the only evidence used against the accused."

Coincidentally, we reported on these exact issues Sunday in a post called Faulty Eyewitness Testimony and linked to an article we wrote on the topic, Could This Happen To Your Spouse or Child: Wrongful Convictions and Eyewitness Testimony, available here.

Sunday's editorial in Chicago Tribune was Fixing the Death Penalty in which it calls upon the Illinois Legislature to implement the reforms recommended by the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment.

"Wrongful convictions, mistaken eyewitness identifications, arbitrarily applied punishment--profound errors at every level of the process--have deeply shaken many people, including some of the most ardent supporters of capital punishment."

"There are 13 people alive today who bear personal witness to that. Those are the people who have been freed from Death Row in recent years because evidence proved they had been wrongfully convicted."

"This is not a system of justice. This is a system of rank injustice. It is deeply fractured, and it must be repaired if Illinois is ever again to carry out a sentence of execution."

"Illinois has issued more than 300 death sentences since the legislature reinstated capital punishment in 1977. We know at least 13 of those sentences were terrible mistakes. We know that in one of those cases, the people of Illinois came within hours of killing an innocent man."

"If the state is to impose irreversible punishment, if the state is to take a life in the pursuit of justice, it must do so with far greater confidence that no innocent man or woman will be executed."