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eyewitnesses to the crime had identified him. In a scene out of Reversal of Fortune , a number of the young lawyers immediately wanted to take the case. The old prosecutor in me preached caution. Several weeks later, the associates, including Brett Hart, who is now my partner, had investigated and found the letter was true—in a sense. None of the eyewitnesses had identified Thomas. However, his two accomplices had turned over on him, and with this encouragement, Chris had confessed three different times, the last occasion on videotape.
    On the night of October 25, 1994, Thomas, twenty-one at the time, and his two pals had run out of gas. Everybody’s stories were roughly the same. All stoned, they hatched a plan to roll somebody for money. Rafael Gasgonia, a thirty-nine-year-old Filipino immigrant, was unfortunate enough to leave the photo shop where he was employed and step out behind the strip mall for a smoke. The three grabbed Gasgonia, pulling him away from the door. Thomas held a gun on him to subdue him, but another struggle broke out and Chris fired once, instantly killing Gasgonia.
    From the start I had only one question: How did a parking lot stickup gone bad end up as a capital case? The six other cases from Lake County, where the crime occurred, that had led to a death penalty were far more aggravated. Hector Reuben Sanchez was one. Alton Coleman, a notorious serial murderer, was another. There was also a double murder; a case where the defendant poisoned his parents and his grandmother-in-law; a murder where the defendant first raped the victim, then shot her five times after she reported the crime; and the murder of a sixty-three-year-old woman in which the defendant beat her with a pipe filled with concrete and then stabbed her through the heart. How did this awful but nonetheless more pedestrian killing bring Thomas to the same fate as John Wayne Gacy?
    It was never completely clear to me why the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office had pressed forward with this as a capital case. To be sure, Chris had a record going back to his days as a juvenile, but the incidents were more in the nature of threatened rather than actual violence—he’d just finished a stretch for discharging a firearm in public, for example. The prosecutors called Chris’s crime an execution-style shooting, because the gun had been pressed close to Mr. Gasgonia’s forehead, but there was no question that robbery, rather than murder, had been the plan. Perhaps the biggest factors in making the case a capital prosecution were that the state had a lot of evidence—Chris’s confession, his accomplices’ words, and several persons to whom Chris had admitted the murder—and Chris had nothing to give them. From conversations afterwards, it appeared to me that the State’s Attorney’s Office had figured they’d plead the case out eventually for a lesser sentence.
    Be that as it may, the salient point is that the death penalty statute gave prosecutors the latitude to charge this “typical” murder as a capital offense. In Illinois, when our death penalty statute was passed in 1977, it listed seven factual circumstances under which a murderer would be eligible for capital punishment—killing a police officer or firefighter; killing a correctional officer or inmate; murdering more than one person; murder in the course of an air hijacking; murder of a witness; contract murder; and felony-murder, referring to an intentional murder committed by the defendant in the course of nine different forcible felonies, such as rape or armed robbery. Today there are twenty-one different ways to qualify for capital punishment in Illinois. Basically, whenever public anxieties have mounted, because of either a prominent murder or an enduring problem like gang warfare, the Illinois legislature, eager to respond to the electorate’s safety concerns, has added to the list of factual