Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Page B

juries—as well as the implied promise to victims’ families—was overturned because of the beliefs of a single individual, no matter how well intentioned.
    On the Friday before he left office, January 10, 2003, Governor Ryan pardoned four men on death row on grounds of innocence. Their cases had all come out of Chicago’s Area Two Violent Crimes station house in the 1980s, where evidence introduced in a police disciplinary hearing and an ensuing federal civil rights trial had been found to show that the commander, Jon Burge, had approved extracting confessions from suspects through systematic torture—electric shock to the genitals, placing typewriter covers over defendants’ heads to deprive them of oxygen, burnings, beatings, forced games of Russian roulette, and hanging suspects from handcuffs. In all four pardoned cases, the principal evidence against the defendant was a confession, which each man maintained Area Two officers had used torture to obtain. Aaron Patterson, a gang leader with a history of serious violence, had contended, since his first court appearance, that he had confessed only after twenty-five hours of physical abuse that included beatings and placing a plastic bag over his face. At one point, he said he had found a paper clip, and on a bench where he’d briefly been left alone, etched a dated message reading, “I lied about murders / Police threatened me with / violence, slapped and / suffocated me with plastic.” The words were later found—and photographed—by an investigator from the Public Defender’s Office.
    The Governor’s pardons brought to seventeen the total number of those sentenced to death in Illinois and later exonerated. But that still left the question of what to do with all the others on death row. After favoring broad but partial clemency, I’d gradually come to recognize the problems with that approach, especially as I began considering how it could be applied in given cases. Deciding on a reasoned basis who would live and who would die was, as ever, virtually impossible.
    Surely, if there was a case to execute anyone, Henry Brisbon, the inmate I’d visited at Tamms, who is probably the most dangerous man in the Illinois prison system, would seem to stand at the top of the list. Yet in the days since Brisbon was first sentenced to death for stabbing an inmate, two prisoners who testified against him, the only eyewitnesses who’d seen Brisbon approach or assault the victim, had both recanted, providing affidavits stating that they lied in response to threats and promises from prosecutors. True, they are convicts, who might have many motives to change their stories—but the state had been willing to take their word at trial, even though both had initially claimed to know nothing about the murder. There was other evidence against Brisbon: his fingerprint was found beneath the tape on the handle of the knife that was probably the murder weapon, leaving little doubt that he was its manufacturer. Given this, I have no question that the evidence against Brisbon supported his conviction. But no one can possibly rest easy with an execution where the only eyewitnesses are jailhouse snitches whose stories have changed often and who now say prosecutors got the wrong man.
    And yet, if you do not execute Henry Brisbon, who in good conscience can be executed? Again and again, the cases that seemed to present the most compelling facts favoring execution proved, under scrutiny, to have elements that raised second thoughts. Kenneth Allen murdered two police officers in 1979, but a portion of his brain had been removed in 1972. He has been in a mental institution for more than two decades. Latasha Pulliam and her boyfriend sexually abused a six-year-old girl with a shoe polish applicator and a hammer, and then strangled her. But Pulliam’s death sentence contrasts with the life sentence the boyfriend received; and there is evidence