Over the next few months three more exonerated men were freed because their sentences hinged on a jailhouse informant or some new DNA technology proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were innocent.

We then had the dubious distinction of exonerating more men than we had executed. Thirteen men found innocent, 12 executed. As I reported yesterday, there is not a doubt in my mind that the number of innocent men freed from our death row stands at 17, with the pardons of Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard and Leroy Orange.

That is an absolute embarrassment. Seventeen exonerated death row inmates is nothing short of a catastrophic failure. But the 13, now 17, men is just the beginning of our sad arithmetic in prosecuting murder cases. During the time we have had capital punishment in Illinois, there were at least 33 other people wrongly convicted on murder charges and exonerated. Since we reinstated the death penalty there are also 93 people -- 93 -- where our criminal justice system imposed the most severe sanction and later rescinded the sentence or even released them from custody because they were innocent.

How many more cases of wrongful conviction have to occur before we can all agree that this system in Illinois is broken?

I also had a meeting with a group of people who are less often heard from and who are not as popular with the media. The family members of death row inmates have a special challenge to face, and I spent an afternoon with those family members at a church here in Chicago on the South Side. At that meeting, I heard a different kind of pain expressed. Many of these families live with the twin pain of knowing not only that in some cases their family members were responsible for inflicting a terrible trauma on another family but also that society has called for another killing. These parents, siblings and children are not to blame for the crime that has been committed, yet these innocents stand to have their loved ones killed by the state. As Mr. Mandela told me, they are also branded and scarred for life because of the awful crime committed by their family member.

Others were even more tormented by the fact that their loved one was another victim, that their loved one was truly innocent of the crime for which they had been sentenced to die.

It was at that meeting that I looked into the face of Claude Lee, another Kankakee citizen. Claude Lee is the father of Eric Lee, who was convicted of killing a Kankakee police officer, Anthony Samfay, a few years ago. It was a traumatic moment, once again, for my hometown of Kankakee. A brave officer, part of that thin blue line that protects all of us from being struck down by wanton violence. If you will kill a police officer, you have absolutely no respect for the laws of man or God.

I have known the Lee family for many years. There does not appear to be a whole lot of question about the guilt of Eric Lee. He killed that officer. However, I can say now that after our review there is also not much question that Eric is and has been for some time very seriously ill, with the history of treatment for mental illness going back a number of years.

I had to ask myself, could I send another man's son to death under the deeply flawed system of capital punishment that we have in Illinois, a troubled young man with a history of mental illness? Could I rely on the system of justice that we have in this state not to make another horrible mistake? Could I rely on a fair sentencing program? Could I rely on a fair sentencing program in the United States?

In the United States, the overwhelming majority of those executed are psychotic, alcoholic, drug-addicted or mentally unstable. And they're frequently raised in an impoverished and abusive environment. Seldom are people with money or prestige convicted of capital offenses, but even more seldom are they executed.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it's unconstitutional and cruel and unusual punishment to execute the mentally retarded. It's now the law of this land. How many people have we already executed who were mentally retarded and are now dead and buried? Although we now know that they have been killed by the state unconstitutionally and illegally. Is that fair? Is that right?

This court decision was last spring. The General Assembly of the state of Illinois has failed to pass any measure defining what constitutes mental retardation. We are a rudderless ship, because they failed to act. This was even after the Illinois Supreme Court also told lawmakers that it was their job and it must be done.

I started with this issue because I was and still am concerned about innocence, but once I studied, I pondered what had become of our justice system. I came to care above all about fairness. Fairness is fundamental to the American system of justice and to our way of life.

The facts that I've seen in reviewing each and every one of these cases raised questions not only about the innocence of people on death row, but about the fairness of the death penalty system as a whole.

If the system was making so many errors in determining whether someone was guilty in the first place, how fairly and accurately was it determining which guilty defendants deserved to live and which deserved to die? What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

And almost every one of the exonerated 17, we'd not only had breakdowns with police and prosecutors and judges, we have terrible cases of shabby defense lawyers. There is no way to sugarcoat what goes on. There are defense attorneys that did not consult with their clients. They didn't investigate the cases that they had, and they were completely unqualified to handle complex death penalty cases. They often don't put much effort into fighting a death sentence, and if your life is on the line, your lawyer certainly ought to be working a little extra hard to make sure that your life is saved. As I've said before, there's more than enough blame to go around about our failures with this system.

I had more questions.

In Illinois I have learned, we have 102 decision-makers. Each of them are politically elected. Each beholden to the demands of their community, and in some cases, to the media or especially vocal victims' families. And I ask you, in cases that have the attention of the media and the public, are decisions to seek the death penalty more likely to occur? What standards are these prosecutors using?

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