An attempt by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner (pictured) to reinstate Illinois’ death penalty by attaching it as an “amendatory veto” to proposed gun-control legislation has failed. Rather than accede to a plan that would condition stricter gun regulation upon reintroducing the death penalty for murders of police officers and any murder with more than a single victim, the state legislature rewrote the gun-control measure the governor had amended, dropping any mention of capital punishment. In May, Gov. Rauner used an amendatory veto—a power some governors are granted that permits them to amend legislation in lieu of an outright veto—to add death-penalty reinstatement to a bill that created a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases. The governor’s provisions would have created a new crime of “death penalty murder,” potentially applicable whenever a police officer or more than one person was killed, subject to a “proof beyond all doubt.” Rauner touted his changes, which also included additional gun control measures, as a comprehensive public-safety policy, but critics called it political grandstanding and state prosecutors objected to its adoption through the veto process without meaningful review and consideration. In a letter to the state House Judiciary-Criminal Committee, John Milhiser, the association’s President, wrote: “there is no consensus of opinion on support for the death penalty” among Illinois prosecutors, but they agreed that the proposal “involves constitutional and legal concerns that cannot be evaluated in the brief time thus far allotted.” Democratic state Rep. Jonathan Carroll, the gun-control bill’s sponsor, said the governor had not consulted him about possible changes and had “hijacked my bill and put politics ahead of policy.” The state house held a brief hearing on the bill on May 21, but did not act on it within the 15-day state constitutional window prescribed for consenting to an amendatory veto. On May 31, 2018, the final day of the legislative session, the legislature passed a clean version of the 72-hour waiting period bill, with no mention of the death-penalty proposal. Governor Rauner has 60 days from passage to take action on that bill.

(Brenden Moore, 72-hour gun purchase wait period bill heads to Rauner’s desk, The Herald & Review, June 1, 2018; Daisy Contreras, Illinois Lawmakers Hear Arguments On Rauner’s Death Penalty Plan, Illinois Public Media, May 22, 2018) Read the letter from the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association to the Illinois House Judiciary Committee. See Recent Legislative Activity.

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