Oh. My. God.

Reasonable people can argue over whether or not the death penalty is a good idea.  But to inflict it on someone who you have every reason to believe is innocent?  That’s what Roland Burris apparently once tried to do when he was Illinois’ state attorney general.  

Seriously:

Public fury over the governor’s alleged misconduct has masked the once lively debate over Burris’ decision to continue to prosecute, despite the objections of one of his top prosecutors, the wrong man for a high-profile murder case.

While state attorney general in 1992, Burris aggressively sought the death penalty for Rolando Cruz, who twice was convicted of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. The crime took place in 1983.

But by 1992, another man had confessed to the crime, and Burris’ own deputy attorney general was pleading with Burris to drop the case, then on appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court.

Burris refused. He was running for governor.

"Anybody who understood this case wouldn’t have voted for Burris," Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, told ProPublica. Indeed, Burris lost that race, and two other attempts to become governor.

Burris’ role in the Cruz case was "indefensible and in defiance of common sense and common decency," Warden said. "There was obvious evidence that [Cruz] was innocent."

Deputy attorney general Mary Brigid Kenney agreed and eventually resigned rather than continue to prosecute Cruz.
 

The implication here is clear:  Burris wanted the guy dead, innocent or not, simply because he thought it would help him win the governorship of Illinois.  (Perhaps he felt that judicially-murdering a Hispanic might give him Honorary White Man status with the downstate and white-flight voters.  Who knows?)

Cases like this, where innocent persons stood in dire danger of being judicially murdered, are among the reasons why former Illinois governor George Ryan — a famously-corrupt Republican now doing time for said corruption — backed the one truly decent cause in his life, and ended the use of the death penalty in Illinois.

Oh. My. God.  That’s all I can say about this.