State of Illinois ends Capital Punishment..thumbs up!

By Matt Smith, CNN Justice from CNN website, March 9, 2011
Illinois put an end to capital punishment Wednesday as Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the practice and commuting the sentences of his state's remaining death row inmates.
The move came 11 years after a spate of death-row exonerations prompted one of Quinn's predecessors to halt executions.
In announcing his decision, Quinn said that a flawed system of capital punishment had put the state in "grave danger" of putting innocent prisoners to death and that creating a "mistake-free" system was impossible.

Congratulations! to the Illinois Governor, to the people of Illinois and especially to the people of the U.S.
In the midst of Congressional hearings attempting to expose radicalization of Muslims within the U.S., and the Wisconsin governor's initiative, supported today by the state Senate's vote to strip public unions of all bargaining rights, and Congressional Republicans' gutting of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Planned Parenthood Group through budget cuts, and proposing a similar gutting of public funds from NPR, the public broadcaster in the U.S., this piece of news out of Illinois rings a note of hope, of sanity and even of justice, in a world quickly going mad.