SPRINGFIELD -- The Illinois House overwhelmingly approved a sweeping legislative package Thursday designed to crack down on wrongful convictions and misconduct by prosecutors.

The action moved Illinois toward becoming the first state to adopt a law that would put strict limits on the testimony of jailhouse informants, whose goal of shortening their sentences by providing testimony for prosecutors often has prompted them to twist the truth at the expense of justice.

The legislation also would place a new burden on prosecutors who fail to turn over evidence to defense lawyers. Unless prosecutors can show that the evidence would not have affected the trial or sentencing, the outcomes could be set aside. Current law requires the defense to prove the outcome would have been different.

Further, the package gives a person facing charges that carry a potential death sentence or term of life in prison the chance to challenge the veracity of witnesses by taking depositions before trial. This provision would also be a legislative first for Illinois, although Florida and Indiana have had more expansive laws since the 1960s.

Rep. Jim Durkin, the Westchester Republican who sponsored the legislation, argued the three-bill package is necessary to provide tools to defense lawyers faced with weeding out potentially explosive evidence in which there are serious questions of credibility.

"Jailhouse informant testimony always should be looked at with a jaundiced eye," Durkin said. "There's a question of reliability."

The legislation would require pretrial reliability hearings before prosecutors would be allowed to put jailhouse informants on the witness stand at trial. The hearings would be conducted by the judge in the case, who would rule on whether the testimony was sufficiently reliable to present at trial.

Tom Geraghty, supervisor of Northwestern University Law School legal clinic, said the bills "if passed into law would be a major step forward in ensuring that prosecutions in serious criminal cases are fair and that defendants have an adequate opportunity to conduct investigations."

Durkin said the package would make good cases better and expose the bad ones for what they are.

He said allowing depositions, or pretrial interviews under oath, of all witnesses except police officers would correct an imbalance between civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

"If you're injured in a fender bender at the corner of State and Madison, you can depose everyone who's at that location at that time and ask them what their observations were of the accident," Durkin said. "However, if you are accused of a terrible crime--murder--in which you are subject to capital punishment and you are identified by one or two witnesses as the person who pulled the trigger, you don't have an opportunity to depose those witnesses."

Veteran criminal defense attorney Sam Adam said the provision allowing pretrial depositions should have included police officers because they are among the most frequent and important prosecution witnesses. He also said the provision likely would lead to fewer trials because defense lawyers would be able to better assess the evidence and decide whether a plea bargain is more appropriate.

Five of the 13 defendants released from Death Row in Illinois since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 were convicted in part on the basis of testimony from jailhouse informants.

"We've come dangerously close in Illinois over the past three years of executing innocent individuals," Durkin said. "We have a legislative and a moral obligation to make changes in this system."Also, in the long run, it's going to make cases better so the culpable person will be prosecuted and the innocent man won't have to wait 15 years to be exonerated."

Durkin, a former Cook County prosecutor weighing a possible bid for attorney general, chaired a House Special Committee on Prosecutorial Misconduct formed after a Tribune series that detailed nearly 400 murder convictions set aside nationwide because of prosecutor misconduct. The series also showed that from 1979 through 1999, on average, a Cook County conviction was overturned once a month because of prosecutor misconduct.

The fate of the Durkin package is less certain in the Senate, where the Republican-controlled chamber has a tendency to favor prosecutors and may want to dilute some of the provisions.

"It's like giving ammunition to the enemy," Senate President James "Pate" Philip (R-Wood Dale) said, adding that he wanted to talk to Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan and DuPage County State's Atty. Joseph Birkett. "We'll look at it. We'll give it a hearing. But I'm assuming we're going to change some of that stuff, but I don't know at this point. The House is much more liberal than we are. We'll look at it objectively."

Last September, Cook County State's Atty. Richard Devine and Birkett appeared at a hearing of Durkin's committee to oppose his proposals, saying the legislation was unnecessarily duplicative of court rules and laws already in place. They contended prosecutorial misconduct rarely occurs and current safeguards were sufficient to protect defendants.

The legislation does have support from some members of law enforcement, including Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, Kane County Sheriff Ken Ramsey and the Illinois Association of Police Chiefs.

Major Illinois cases that raised questions about jailhouse statements include the DuPage County prosecution of Rolando Cruz, a case in which he was sentenced to death but later set free. And the Ford Heights Four case, which cost Cook County $26 million in damages when the defendants were exonerated, illustrates the high price of bad prosecutions.

Last year, when Gov. George Ryan issued a moratorium on executions in Illinois, he cited concerns over the use of jailhouse informants along with "bad lawyers and overzealous prosecutors." He has a task force studying the issue and expects the group to come up with recommendations.

The governor said Durkin's package is "headed in the right direction."

"Now whether it will address all of the issues that my commission is interested in, that's another question," Ryan said.