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Reporters' BLOG |
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February 2009
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It doesn't seem possible to some but the storm brewing over Roland Burris' admission about trying to raise money for Gov. Blagojevich has Illinois on the verge of another scandal. 1 CommentsLeave a comment |
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How soon we forget... From 1991 to 1995, Roland Burris was Attorney General for the State of Illinois, where he supervised over 500 lawyers. There, he was the second African American elected to a state office of Attorney General in the United States. In 1985, while Burris was Attorney General, 19-year old Rolando Cruz was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death along with a co-defendant in a DuPage County Circuit Court, for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a 10-year old child. In 1992, Assistant Attorney General Mary Brigid Kenney, whom Burris had assigned to fight Cruz's appeal, sent Burris a memo identifying numerous errors in the investigation and trial in Cruz's initial conviction, and refused to participate in upholding what she considered to be a wrongful conviction. Burris ignored Kenney's warnings, and she resigned in protest, writing to Burris, "I was being asked to help execute an innocent man... Unfortunately, you have seen fit to ignore the evidence in this case".[6] In September 1995, DNA tests showed that neither Cruz nor his co-defendant were the contributors of the semen found at the crime scene, thus exonerating them.[7] Cruz was fully pardoned by Governor George Ryan in 2002, [8] leading
In 1993, Burris, an advocate for a national handgun ban, helped to organize Chicago's first Gun Turn-in Day. The following year, Burris admitted that he kept a handgun in his home and had not turned it into police as he had urged others to do. A spokesman stated that Burris had "forgotten about" the handgun.[10]
In 1995, he ran for mayor of Chicago, losing to incumbent Richard M. Daley. In 1998 and 2002, he again unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of Illinois, running in 2002 against, among others, Rod Blagojevich. During his 2002 run for governor he was supported by, among others, current President-elect Barack Obama.[11] In 1998, Burris caused a controversy by referring to his Democratic primary opponents — Jim Burns, Glenn Poshard (who eventually won the nomination) and John Schmidt — as "nonqualified white boys".[12]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Burris