He was elected Illinois Attorney General in 1990, serving from 1991 to 1995, 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."