Federal officials tried to big foot Illinois prosecutors, and try Brendt Christiansen in federal court so that he might face the death penalty. A jury in Peoria rejected that effort, as Injustice Watch co-founder Rob Warden writes.
This post has been updated to correct the year that the murder occurred.
A divided jury in Peoria today rejected the death penalty for Brendt A. Christensen, consigning him instead to life in prison for the 2017 kidnapping and murder of 26-year-old Yingying Zhang, a University of Illinois researcher from China.
The outcome shows how ill-advised it was for federal prosecutors to usurp state jurisdiction in a case where there was no compelling federal interest.
The feds big-footed Illinois in the Christensen case for no reason other than that the death penalty was off the table in the state—where it was abolished in 2011.
While there is overlapping federal-state jurisdiction in many criminal cases, the feds ought to be bound by common sense, if by nothing else, to defer to states in all prosecutions absent some compelling federal interest.
The most recent previous federal death penalty case brought in Illinois involved the murder of a federal witness against a Chicago podiatrist accused of Medicare fraud. The defendant in that case, Ronald Mikos, was sentenced to death in 2005.
That 14 years later Mikos remains years away from execution illustrates that federal capital cases are largely exercises in futility—but in his case, at least, there was a clear federal interest.
Not so in the Christiansen case.
The jury’s decision will save the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, that it would have cost as appeals of a death sentence in his case meandered through the courts for years.
Had he been sentenced to death, the 29-year-old Christensen would have joined Mikos and 60 other condemned prisoners on federal death row—three of whom have been there more than a quarter of a century.
If Christensen dwelt on death row as long as those three already have, he would be 55 years old—and no doubt a quite different person than the deranged young man who killed Yingying Zhang.
The Peoria jury and Christensen’s legal team are to be congratulated on the outcome.
We can only hope that the federal prosecutors and their superiors in Washington learn from the experience.
Rob Warden is co-founder of Injustice Watch.
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Rob Warden was a co-founder of Injustice Watch and executive director emeritus and co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) at Northwestern University School of Law. During his 16-year tenure, the CWC was instrumental in exonerating 31 wrongfully convicted men and women in Illinois. Before launching the CWC, Rob was editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer, where his investigations into Illinois capital cases launched a movement that culminated both in the founding of the Center in 1999 and abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011. His reporting at Chicago Lawyer was instrumental in 13 exonerations, including that of Gary Dotson, the nation’s first prisoner to be exonerated by DNA. Before that, Rob was a prize-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Daily News and Washington Post. He has won more than 50 journalism awards and is the author of seven books.
The death penalty didn’t play in Peoria
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This post has been updated to correct the year that the murder occurred.
A divided jury in Peoria today rejected the death penalty for Brendt A. Christensen, consigning him instead to life in prison for the 2017 kidnapping and murder of 26-year-old Yingying Zhang, a University of Illinois researcher from China.
The outcome shows how ill-advised it was for federal prosecutors to usurp state jurisdiction in a case where there was no compelling federal interest.
The feds big-footed Illinois in the Christensen case for no reason other than that the death penalty was off the table in the state—where it was abolished in 2011.
While there is overlapping federal-state jurisdiction in many criminal cases, the feds ought to be bound by common sense, if by nothing else, to defer to states in all prosecutions absent some compelling federal interest.
The most recent previous federal death penalty case brought in Illinois involved the murder of a federal witness against a Chicago podiatrist accused of Medicare fraud. The defendant in that case, Ronald Mikos, was sentenced to death in 2005.
That 14 years later Mikos remains years away from execution illustrates that federal capital cases are largely exercises in futility—but in his case, at least, there was a clear federal interest.
Not so in the Christiansen case.
The jury’s decision will save the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, that it would have cost as appeals of a death sentence in his case meandered through the courts for years.
Had he been sentenced to death, the 29-year-old Christensen would have joined Mikos and 60 other condemned prisoners on federal death row—three of whom have been there more than a quarter of a century.
If Christensen dwelt on death row as long as those three already have, he would be 55 years old—and no doubt a quite different person than the deranged young man who killed Yingying Zhang.
The Peoria jury and Christensen’s legal team are to be congratulated on the outcome.
We can only hope that the federal prosecutors and their superiors in Washington learn from the experience.
Rob Warden is co-founder of Injustice Watch.
Rob Warden
Rob Warden was a co-founder of Injustice Watch and executive director emeritus and co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) at Northwestern University School of Law. During his 16-year tenure, the CWC was instrumental in exonerating 31 wrongfully convicted men and women in Illinois. Before launching the CWC, Rob was editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer, where his investigations into Illinois capital cases launched a movement that culminated both in the founding of the Center in 1999 and abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011. His reporting at Chicago Lawyer was instrumental in 13 exonerations, including that of Gary Dotson, the nation’s first prisoner to be exonerated by DNA. Before that, Rob was a prize-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Daily News and Washington Post. He has won more than 50 journalism awards and is the author of seven books.
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