State Politics
Burris sought the Democratic nomination for the office of Illinois Comptroller in 1976, but was defeated by Michael Bakalis. In 1978 Bakalis did not seek re-election as Comptroller, choosing to run for Governor and Burris won the Comptrollership. Burris served for three terms from 1979–1990. He was the first African American to be elected to a statewide office in the state of Illinois. While serving as Comptroller, Burris was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1984, losing to Paul Simon who went on to defeat incumbent Senator Charles Percy.
From 1991 to 1995, he was Attorney General for the State of Illinois, where he supervised over 500 lawyers. There, he was the second African American ever to be elected to a state office of Attorney General in the United States (after Edward Brooke). In 1985, 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 refusing 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". 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. In 2002 Governor George Ryan fully pardoned Cruz, and went on to declare a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, asserting that the system was "fraught with error".
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.
In 1994, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Illinois. While Burris had been favored for much of the primary campaign, he and Cook County Board President Richard Phelan were both defeated by Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, who had a strong late showing in the final weeks of the campaign despite being seen as the underdog. Netsch would go down to defeat the following November against incumbent Republican Governor Jim Edgar in an election where Democrats lost every single race for statewide office.
In 1995, Burris ran as an independent for mayor of Chicago, losing to incumbent Richard M. Daley. In 1998, he again unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of Illinois. In that race, 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". During his 2002 run for governor against, among others, Rod Blagojevich, he was supported by, among others, current President Barack Obama.
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