Illinois has executed 12 people since 1976, when the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. But 13 death-row inmates in Illinois have been exonerated since 1987, either through appeals, DNA evidence or, in a few cases, like that of Porter, by persistent investigation by college students. Porter was freed in February 1999 by evidence collected by students at Northwestern University. Working on a class journalism project, the students proved that the police and prosecutors in the Porter case relied on tainted testimony. Simply put, the main prosecution witness could not have seen what he swore he saw.
Recent surveys suggest that they do.
It did not, however, put a moratorium on the death penalty. Furrow, a white supremacist, faces the death penalty because of the murder of Ileto, who was shot allegedly because he was an employee of the US government and because he was not white. However, capital punishment is rare in federal cases. The last federal execution was in 1963. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled it had been unfairly applied, and restored it at the federal level in 1988.