Fifteen prisoners saved from death as Illinois abolishes capital punishment

Fifteen prisoners on Death Row have been told they will not be killed after a US state finally abolished capital punishment.

Illinois - in America's Mid-West - suspended the death penalty 10 years ago after 13 men were found to be wrongly condemned.

And in January the state's lawmakers voted to end executions. But it wasn't until yesterday that Governor Pat Quinn finally announced he was going to abolish the death penalty.

The 15 inmates will now serve life in prison, according to Mirror.co.uk.

Since 1977, Illinois's criminal justice system has wrongly condemned at least 20 people to death. Governor Quinn courageously put aside his own longtime support for the death penalty to ensure that the state does not commit any more such horrors.

Illinois joins 15 other states, the District of Columbia and most modern nations in rejecting the barbarism and capriciousness of the death penalty.

Governor Quinn not only declared that his state's system for applying the death penalty was "inherently flawed."

After two months of consultation and debate with prosecutors, judges, crime victims, religious leaders and state citizens, he concluded that "it is impossible to devise a system that is consistent, that is free of discrimination on the basis of race, geography or economic circumstance, and that always gets it right," New York Times reports.