You won’t find Eric Zorn outside Stateville holding a candle during executions. He isn’t your typical death penalty opponent, and not just because he has a column in the Chicago Tribune.
Still, Zorn stays on the losing side of the argument. Last year he took up the case of death row inmate Rolando Cruz in a series of 15 columns and 8 subsequent columns, exhaustively examining evidence he maintains shows Cruz’s innocence in the 1983 rape and murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. The Illinois supreme court overturned Cruz’s second conviction last summer, and Cruz’s third trial is set to begin September 11. Jed Stone, Cruz’s lawyer in his second trial, gives credit for that to Cruz’s various lawyers and, of course, the supreme court itself. “But a great deal of credit has to be put on the shoulders of Eric Zorn for his informing the public of the injustice of the conviction of Rolando Cruz,” he says.
Ted Bundy, of all people, nudged Zorn into opposing the death penalty. Or rather, it was the raucous crowds of people celebrating Bundy’s execution. “I was one of these people who didn’t give [the death penalty] much thought, and when it happened to people like Ted Bundy I couldn’t feel that sorry about it,” Zorn recalls. “One of the things that got me, that started turning me around–it was a slow process, it wasn’t like one day I was struck by some revelation–one of the things was watching the cheering when Bundy was executed….It was this real internal dissonance, to see these idiots carrying on, celebrating the death of a human being in that fashion, realizing that I was on their side. That’s kind of a clue that the candidate you’re backing for political office is secretly a Nazi or something. I wanted to look into it a little bit more.”
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Zorn’s column on Hampton introduced several of what would become his main themes: the death penalty as an expensive “state-sponsored boondoggle”; the idea that capital punishment would be moral, if not a moral imperative, if it could be proved that it has a deterrent effect on other would-be murderers–though nearly every study shows it is not a deterrent; the idea that he could be against the death penalty and tough on crime; and his unflinching look at the death row inmates themselves, whether he believes an individual is guilty or not.
Politicians who endorse the death penalty as a tough-on-crime position are hypocritical, he says. “They aren’t really willing to look into and start doing the kinds of things you need to do to start solving the crime problem, or attacking the crime problem, let’s say.” The anti-death-penalty position is “a much more smart-on-crime position,” he insists, “because you can take the resources that go into [the judicial execution process] and put them into whatever you want. You can put ’em into prisons, put ’em into community programs, education, jobs. You can take that money and spend it.”
“But we don’t do that,” says Zorn. “Our system of justice holds itself above that in every other case. If someone is guilty of assault, we don’t take him into the courtroom, say, ‘OK you’re found guilty, bailiff come beat up the defendant.’ We don’t do that. Because we realize violence only begets more of the same. It creates a violent society. I mean, that’s one of the questions I ask–why don’t we torture people? Why don’t we cut off their hands and arms and whip them in the public square and put them in stocks? When someone is a drunk driver and kills someone, why don’t we go put them in a car and put a brick on the accelerator and tie their hands behind their back and drive them into a wall? Why don’t we do that stuff?”
After conjuring up the nail scissors and rats image in one column before Gacy’s execution, Zorn bluntly told death penalty opponents they “had best sit this one out.” “He’s so damn guilty he’s a metaphor for guilt,” he wrote. “But he will soon be a dead metaphor, as it were, at which point the debate over this defining issue just might be able to move forward rationally. In the meantime, just this once, I won’t object if they get out the nail scissors.”
