This would have been an interesting year for Carl Sagan.

Two events occurred that would have resonated neatly within his guiding principles. At midsummer, the thrill of venturing into outer space flickered to life again, and, for a brief moment, the value of science seemed measured once more in simple wonder. For that moment, NASA — the downsized and reinvented federal space program — managed to recapture a fickle public's attention, transmitting pictures from Mars, sharing in breathless blow by blow the details of technical accomplishment, the significance of discovery.

Sagan, the philosopher scientist, the showman astronomer who encouraged a generation to ponder the vastness of the universe, would have loved it.

He might have understood, too, another, darker story. In the spring, a comet called Hale-Bopp grew steadily more visible in the evening sky. But some were seized by the delusion that it trailed an alien spaceship. And Americans were riveted by the news that people thought they could hop a ride to another planet by killing themselves.

In fact, the fatal lure of pseudoscience was Sagan's theme at the tailend of his own life. It's the premise of The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he completed before his death last December. It was reissued in paperback in the spring by Ballantine.

Sagan argues that science may be a less-than-perfect instrument of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is selfcorrecting: It tests alternative hypotheses, remains open to facts that don't conform to preconceptions. The scientific mind allows for ambiguity, admits to unresolved mysteries.

"Yes/' Sagan writes, "the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFO's lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future."

But that is pseudoscience. And dangerous. "Pseudoscience," he writes, "is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood." Still, Sagan's central theme is not what Americans believe, or what they don't know, but how they've been taught to think. Or not taught to think. "Science is more than a body of knowledge," he writes, "it is a way of thinking." And these days it's imperative that scientists and educators teach that way of thinking.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

DISUNITED STATES

John D. Donahue, 1997 Basic Books

That power has shifted from the federal government to the states is old news. And, as John D. Donahue details in his cautionary analysis, the relative powers of the central government and the states is also an old argument — as old as the country itself. And unlikely to be settled soon.

Still, Donahue sees reasons for concern in this latest "devolution." He worries that Washington is endangering its moral legitimacy and fragmenting its capacity to set a national agenda as we face rapid global change. The most consequential economic division among the postrevolutionary states, he argues, concerned international trade: Competition squandered the limited political and economic leverage of the new country. And the consequences could be greater today. "Enchanted by the advantages of state autonomy, we are rushing to abandon the far greater advantages of a continent-scale common front with which to face the coming century's economic pressures."

Illinois Issues September 1997 / 27

LEGAL LYNCHING Racism, Injustice and the Death Penalty
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, with Jesse Jackson Jr.
1996, Marlowe & Company

AMONG THE LOWEST OF THE DEAD The Culture of Death Row
David Von Drehle
1995, Random House

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Lawrence M. Friedman
1993, Basic Books

"When the government kills, we are all executioners."

THE REV. JESSE JACKSON

On September 12,1990, the state killed Charles Walker. A lethal mixture of chemicals put Walker under in a matter of minutes, and put Illinois back in the execution business after 28 years.

Yet while his death was the first under a revised capital statute, Walker was not a full-blown legal test case for the state. And he was a thin reed for Illinois' death penalty foes to cling to. Walker confessed; he refused to go beyond his one mandatory appeal; and he successfully fought appeals on his behalf. In short, he wanted to die.

He had good reasons. Charles Walker spent half his adult life in a drunken rage. He spent the other half in the state pen, beginning a stint at Menard before the age of 20. He committed four felonies and served four prison terms between the winter of 1958 and the summer of 1983.

That's the summer he met — and killed — Kevin Paule and Sharon Winker, an engaged couple in their 20s. Walker spent the morning of June 18 drinking. In the afternoon, he headed to Silver Creek near Mascoutah in southwestern Illinois to do some fishing. Paule and Winker cast their lines nearby, and Walker saw a chance for easy cash. He tied the two to trees with duct tape; after Paule recognized him, he shot each in the head. Two lives for little more than $40 in beer money.

But if the dreary details of Charles Walker's life merely underscore the banality of evil, John Wayne Gacy's life was a surreal horror.

Gacy was the second man executed under the state's new death penalty law. An amateur clown, he has been called the worst serial killer in U.S. history. It's believed he molested and strangled 33 young men between 1972 and 1978. Twenty-eight skeletons were found in a crawl space under his home near O'Hare Airport. Only those with the strongest moral or philosophical convictions could argue against killing such a killer.

And Gacy was executed May 10, 1994. The state was on a roll. Six more were put to death in the next three years. Executions began to seem routine; the vigils outside the death chamber dwindled. Illinois is hardly a leader in the number of executions. Texas put 107 people to death between 1976 and 1996. Florida executed 39 in the same period.

Illinois is a leader, though, on another score: the number of death row residents who have been found innocent. In recent years, nine have been exonerated, seven in the last four years. Among them: Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, who were convicted of killing 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. They were released in 1995, and misconduct charges have been brought against four police officers and three former prosecutors.

Death penalty opponents see in such statistics the possibility for a public shift. They believe doubts about the reliability and fairness of capital punishment could reopen a debate about the value and purpose of state sanctioned killing.

Meanwhile, the American Bar Association, which takes no position on the merits of the death penalty, called for a moratorium on executions until states can ensure that defendants receive adequate representation. And a coalition of Illinois politicians, human rights activists and legal rights groups called for an investigation into this state's high error rate. The coalition includes the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who wrote Legal Lynching with his son, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Though support for the death penalty is high, anti-death penalty activists believe it is soft. In its June 16 issue, Time magazine reported that 74 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for serious crimes. However, when asked whether they think the death penalty deters people from committing crime, 52 percent said no. Sixty percent said vengeance is not a legitimate reason for putting a murderer to death. The survey was conducted during Timothy McVeigh's trial for the Oklahoma City bombing.

Even Jackson, who would prefer converts against the death penalty on moral grounds, concedes its popularity. He focuses on bias in administration. "The death penalty is unjust," he writes, "first because it is morally wrong, but also because it is unevenly and unfairly implemented, discriminatorily enforced against the weak, the poor, and minorities."

Jackson's book has the passion of advocacy, but it lacks the rich detail and objective focus of David Von Drehle's Among the Lowest of the Dead. Von Drehle, a reporter, was working for The Miami Herald when Florida implemented a new capital statute. His assessment: The death penalty doesn't work.

Drehle follows all of the players in the legal and political maneuvering leading to the 1979 execution of John Arthur Spenkelink. He concludes that, while the event was momentous, commentators misread its significance:
the enormous resources required to execute a single man.

"The incoherent nature of modern death penalty law meant that an ever increasing number of cases was wrapped in an ever-complicated web of appeals." A 1988 study by the Herald calculated that Florida had spent at

28 / September 1997 Illinois Issues

least $57 million to execute 18 men, an average cost of $3.2 million per execution. A life sentence would be cheaper.

Von Drehle rests his case with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's 1994 change of heart on the death penalty: "It seems that the decision whether a human being should live or die is so inherently subjective, rife with all of life's understandings, experiences, prejudices and passions, that it inevitably defies the rationality and consistency required by the Constitution.... I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."

Blackmun was on the bench in 1972 when the high court swept away death penalty laws throughout the nation, including Illinois', ruling that capital punishment had been applied capriciously and challenging the states to wrestle with whether it is "cruel and unusual." The justices then decided in a series of cases that capital punishment can be used if it specifies which types of murder are covered and narrowly defines the standards by which the law can be applied.

Illinois rewrote its statute in 1973, but that version was overturned by the state supreme court. Then-Gov. James R. Thompson signed the current law in 1977. In 1983, he agreed to switch from the electric chair to lethal injection. In a printed statement Thompson said he was persuaded the shift wasn't an attempt to make the death penalty more acceptable to opponents.

Nevertheless, Illinoisans have always searched for ways to make executions acceptable to evolving public tastes. Lawrence M. Friedman traces those shifts nationally in Crime and Punishment in American History. Friedman, a law professor at Stanford University, argues that judgments about crime and punishment are cultural constructs, specific to time and place. "Whatever else it does, the criminal code reflects, though perhaps at times as crudely as a funhouse mirror, some notion of the moral sense of the community — or, to be more accurate, the moral sense of the people who count, and who speak out, in the community," he writes. "Criminal justice 'teaches a lesson' to the people it punishes, and also to the public at large. It is also a kind of banner or flag that announces the values and norms of society.".

Photograph courtesy Illinois State Historical Library Southern Illinois bootlegger Charlie Birger was hanged April 19, 1928, in Benton for murdering West City Mayor Joe Adams. Five hundred people were given passes to witness the event. The Herrin News reported that when Birger "dropped to his death" at 9:51 a.m., the hangman had accomplished the first legal execution in Franklin County. (The gallows were borrowed from Jackson County.) Birger's execution was likely the last legal hanging in the state. The newspaper noted that anyone convicted under the new "electric chair law" would be executed in one of the state penitentiaries or in the Cook County jail.

In Colonial America, for instance, people were executed for adultery. Burning at the stake was considered an appropriate solution. And punishment was meant to bring redemption to the sinner and to the society whose values had been offended. It was a communal affair.

Burning at the stake was no longer popular by the mid-19th century. And social reformers had grown squeamish about hanging criminals in the town square. Yet public hangings were still occurring in Illinois as late as 1851. In January of that year, the Springfield Illinois Daily Journal published a dispatch from the Peoria Republican about a double hanging in that city

The paper reported that "some ten or twelve thousand persons" turned out to see two young murderers "launched into eternity." One of their two "spiritual advisers," the Rev. Mr. Spencer, "exhorted the people take warning from the example before them."

Levi Spencer left an account of the event, and his journal is now part of the State Historical Library's collection.He was struck by the curiosity of the crowd in witnessing the event. "In my soul," he wrote, "I am opposed to public executions."

In fact, Friedman reports that throughout the nation hangings were being moved into enclosed areas. Because capital punishment was a local responsibility in Illinois until the late 1920s, the number of hangings is difficult to document.

One well-documented case was Charlie Birger's hanging in Benton in 1928. Though it took place in the courtyard of the county jail, The Herrin News reported that 500 people were given passes to witness the event. Residents of that part of the state still talk about having relatives who were there.

But that year, capital punishment became a state responsibility. The . condemned (98 before Walker, including one woman) were dispatched by electric chair from Joliet, Menard and Cook County. The last electrified execution took place in 1962.

But tinkering with methods and administrative procedures and debating constitutional provisions sidesteps key questions: What purpose does the death penalty serve in this "time and place"? What does it "reflect" about the moral sense of our community? These are the questions we seem least willing to address.

Illinois Issues September 1997 / 29