Welcome to The Courtroom Insider. I’m Bill Mayeroff and I’m a reporter for the The Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus newspapers in Moline, Ill. This is where I’ll be blogging about the murder trial of Elijah Reid.
Mr. Reid is facing four counts of first-degree murder. He is accused in the deaths of Jermaine O. Robinson and Ryan Ferry in April of 2008. The men were found shot to death April 11, 2008 in a car in Rock Island, allegedly the victims of a drug deal gone bad.
Make sure you check out the timeline page for a little background about Mr. Reid’s case.
This is a case unlike any seen in Rock Island County in a long time. In December of 2008, Rock Island County State’s Attorney Jeff Terronez announced he would be seeking the death penalty if Mr. Reid gets convicted. If he is given the death penalty, it would be the first such sentence in the county since 1994. That year, Erik Birdsall was sentenced to death for shooting two Davenport teenagers and killing one of them in 1993. Mr. Birdsall was on death row for two years before the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his sentence, ruling he had not had a mental fitness hearing before the trial. According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, he is now serving 130 years in the Pontiac Correctional Center in Pontiac, Ill.
The idea of this blog is not to just talk about Elijah Reid’s trial, though that’s a part of it. I’ll also be talking about the larger issues surrounding the death penalty in Illinois and in general and how they affect this particular case. This blog should also be a place for discussion. After all, you wonderful readers all have thoughts and opinions and I want to hear them. So by all means, comment and e-mail. I’ll be reading everything and using excerpts of comments and e-mails in my posts. I’ll respond to as many e-mails as possible, either privately or on this blog. I can’t promise to respond to them all, though.
See the contact page if you want to know how to e-mail me.
As I mentioned before, this is a place for discussion. So please leave comments on the posts. I’ll read them all and respond to those that I think warrant it. I’m happy to answer questions in comment strings as best I can. But before you comment, please read the guidelines page.
Above all, I want to thank everyone for reading. I hope you enjoy it.
Interesting stuff. I’ll be following as the debate is fascinating. I am against the death penalty, but mainly because life in prison is the superior option. I would like to see the EU and other anti-death penalty organizations focus on promoting life in prison. This would, in effect, move to eliminate the death penalty. Like the semantics of the abortion debate, where everyone is pro life and choice, but differences remain concerning abortion…society should find less polarizing methods to debate the death penalty.
And where is Amnesty when horrible miscarriages of justice occur, such as the Scotland Lockerbie bomber’s release and return to Algeria or the Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman being given conjugal visits and marrying while incarcerated in Peru. Life in prison allows the innocent to have a chance of overturning their sentence, but also guarantees that the worst of the worst stay in prison and never have a chance to harm others. It also sets a concrete message to the world. And life in prison cannot give absurd privileges. Amnesty expresses outrage about the execution of even the obviously guilty, but are less concerned about issues with greater human weight. Change focus, that’s all I’m saying.
The death penalty is better than letting prisoners free, and though I don’t cry for the Ted Bundys and Timothy McVeighs, I think life can be universally and justly applied with the least complaint.