Life vs Registry

A pie-in-the-sky idea, but we can't see Quinn jailing potential voters for that long:

• Earlier this month, the Illinois House of Representatives passed a law creating a “murderer registry” that would require criminals convicted of first-degree murder to check in with the state for 10 years after their release from prison.

  The bill was named for Andrea Will, a young Batavia woman who was strangled to death by her boyfriend in 1998, when they were both students at Eastern Illinois University.

  The boyfriend, Justin Boulay, was set free last year after serving only half his 24-year sentence. For taking away an estimated 70 years of his girlfriend’s life, Boulay did just 12 years in the joint.

  Here’s an even better plan for keeping an eye on killers: don’t let them out of prison. I was all in favor of repealing the death penalty, but if Illinois isn’t going to have capital punishment, we should have another method of permanently removing murderers from society. The penalty for first-degree murder should be changed to a mandatory life sentence, with no chance of parole. It’s a lot easier to keep track of people in prison. Instead of asking murderers to check in with the state, we’ll have prison guards check their beds every night.

While we personally favor removing murders from breathing air, there would have to be way more safeguards in place for us to even consider supporting something like this. Like guarantees against assholes like Ryan emptying the prisons or Quinn from paroling/pardoning/commuting everything in sight for a political end.