Young Mr. Obama - By Edward McClelland Page 0,82
belonged to Trinity United Church of Christ, but she was so infuriated by his bill-jacking that she endorsed Dan Hynes in the Senate primary.)
After he passed the racial profiling bill, Obama was able to use his new relationships with law enforcement on a far more important issue: death penalty reform.
No one disputed that Illinois’s system of capital punishment needed an overhaul. After thirteen death row prisoners turned out to be innocent, Governor George Ryan halted all executions and appointed a task force to study the problem. (In January 2003, during his final week in office, Ryan commuted every death sentence.) Even law-and-order types had an interest in reform. Unless there were changes, Illinois would never execute another murderer.
The task force came up with eighty-five recommendations, including banning executions of retarded prisoners and requiring police to videotape interrogations of accused killers. Obama seized on the videotape proposal and determined to make it law. At first, almost everyone opposed taping, from police groups to the new governor, Rod Blagojevich.
“A criminal spends more time avoiding capture than sometimes we can spend [capturing them],” one prosecutor complained. “So if he lies for hours upon hours during his interview, now we’ve got eleven hours of videotape when finally the facts are so compelling that the defendant, the accused, says, ‘Okay, I did it,’ and tells us what happened. What happens then is that the prosecutor now has eleven hours of videotape, ten hours of lies. Am I to show that to a jury?”
But the bill was important to Obama. Video cameras would train an electronic eye on the Chicago police, whose detectives had obtained murder confessions by smothering suspects with typewriter covers, walloping them with telephone books, jolting them with cattle prods, and burning their flesh with cigarettes. The interrogations were so painful that innocent men confessed to murders they’d never committed. Four police torture victims were freed by Governor Ryan’s last-minute amnesty.
Obama met with the state police, the county prosecutors, the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association, and the FOP to answer every objection to videotaping. The state would offer grants to strapped cities, Obama promised. His bill would allow audiotaping. If the police forgot to turn on the equipment, the confession could still be used as long as there was, as Obama put it, “reliability and voluntariness shown.” Obama even dug up a Florida case in which videotape helped the cops nail a lying suspect. The man claimed he couldn’t have committed the crime because he was blind. When his interrogators left the room, he pulled out a sheet of notes.
Obama’s arguments even impressed the senate’s grimmest cheerleader for the death penalty, Edward Petka. As a state’s attorney, Petka had put so many criminals on death row he was nicknamed “Electric Ed.” The year before, Obama and Petka had offered opposing points of view for a PBS NewsHour report on death penalty reform. Petka was against nearly all the commission’s recommendations.
“The net effect, in my point of view, is simply to make it impossible for any prosecutor to seek the death penalty,” Petka had said.
Yet even Electric Ed voted for videotaping and for the death penalty reform package.
Emil Jones was reveling in his exalted position in Springfield. To celebrate his newly acquired power, he changed his cell phone ringtone to the Godfather theme. From his office suite behind the senate’s Victorian chamber, Jones orchestrated his campaign to make Obama a senator—or, who knew, maybe more than a senator. That’s how much the senate president thought of Obama’s talent. Jones made sure Obama’s bills passed through the Rules Committee and on to the full senate. And he leaned on other senators to support his boy, offering perks in exchange for their endorsements.
Jones had to work over some of the Downstaters. “Barack Obama?” they’d say. “That’s a tough name down in Southern Illinois. How are we gonna sell him? An African-American is enough of a problem. But an African-American with a Muslim name? That’s a big problem.”
Sparta, Illinois, got a $29 million gun range as a way of encouraging its senator to support Obama. When black senators complained about voting for guns, Jones told them to suck it up.
“You want six million dollars for after-school programs, there’s gonna be a gun range in Southern Illinois,” the president rumbled.
Jones had to work just as hard on members of the black caucus, who resented Obama’s preferential treatment. There wasn’t much Jones could do about a house member like Monique Davis, but he called Hendon and Trotter into his office, over