Catholic Social Services of So. IL may join lawsuit

Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois will find out today if it will be allowed to join a lawsuit against the state over foster placements to gay couples.

Peter Breen is executive director and legal counsel for the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm based in Chicago. He is an attorney representing Catholic Social Services in its lawsuit against the state.

Breen says the diocese based in Belleville wants to join the dioceses in Springfield, Peoria and Joliet in the suit because there is a question whether the judge's order would cover Catholic Social Services.

“They wanted to make sure that we have a consistent result across the state, and so we’re glad to have them join. They’ve always been in support of a lawsuit, but had not joined officially up to this point,” Breen said.

The Department of Children and Family Services ended its foster-care and adoption services with Catholic Charities July 1st because it says the group discriminates by not allowing gay couples to take kids.

Sangamon County Judge John Schmidt has ruled that the foster-care contracts must stay in place until an August 17th hearing.

Brad Palmer, WSIU

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Illinois abolishes death penalty

CARBONDALE, IL (WSIU) - A new law took effect Friday that abolished the death penalty in Illinois.

Southern Illinois attorney Tim Capps of Carbondale was one of the first to join an elite group of trial lawyers in the state who were judged competent to handle death cases.

He says the new law will have a financial impact because the cost of trying murder cases will now fall on individual counties instead of the Capital Litigation Trust Fund.

Capps says it might be a good idea for the state to establish another fund to help counties pay for the cost of these cases.

“In order to have the best and most fair possible, you still have to have experts, you still have to have qualified attorneys. Now all of those safeguards that we been put in to place to protect innocent people from getting on death row … those aren’t going to be available to people who are facing non-death murder cases, which will be everyone who is charged with murder from here on out,”Capps said.

Capps says the average cost of a capital murder case ranges from $500 to $700 thousand, with some costing over a million dollars. He says judges will not allow murder cases to go that high now because counties will have to foot the bill.

The $420 thousand left in the capital litigation trust fund is supposed to go toward counseling for families of murder victims.

Brad Palmer, WSIU

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Illinois officials begin flood assessment

CARBONDALE, IL (WSIU) - Officials from the state and federal levels arrived in southern Illinois Monday to begin documenting damage to homes and businesses from this spring's flooding.

Staff from the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA), FEMA and the U.S. Small Business Administration say information gathered during the damage assessment will be used by the state of Illinois to support a request for federal assistance.

IEMA director Jonathon Monken says five teams of state and federal officials will conduct damage assessments in about a dozen counties.

"Basically what they are focusing their attention and time on is counties that actually reported having private homes or significant private property damage in the course of the flood," Monken said. "So this is really the phase that we are really working on right now is the individual assistance phase, which is geared specifically towards those private properties."

Monken says he expects the damage assessments to be completed by the end of the week.

He says the assessments will be very thorough.

“They look for a lot of things. The water level in the house. How high it ultimately reached. Whether or not it hit the electrical system or affected the electrical systems. Whether or not basic life support functions are still there, meaning life support in terms of water, electricity, heating, air conditioning, things like that. And then they also look at whether or not there was any structural damage to the home itself,” Monken said.

The documentation of damage comes as the Ohio River continues receding, having threatened Cairo and swamped parts of Metropolis.

The Ohio River's retreat meant that a highway bridge linking Cairo to Wickliffe, Kentucky has reopened, and the curfew in Cairo was lifted Monday.

Governor Pat Quinn issued a state disaster declaration for the southern Illinois flooding on April 25th.

Brad Palmer, WSIU

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