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A former death penalty proponent pulls the switch on capital punishment in Illinois.
By David Goodman
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Illinois Governor George Ryan speaks to a gathering of students, faculty, media, law professors and family members of death row inmates 11 January, 2003 at Northwestern University College of Law in Chicago, IL. © AFP |
George Ryan sat at a Formica counter in Manny's, a storied Chicago diner. He was contentedly munching on a corned beef sandwich when he was interrupted by a call on his cell phone. It was the day before the Illinois governor was to make the most momentous announcement of his tumultuous political career. But when Nelson Mandela wants to chat, you put down your corned beef and hear him out.
Mandela "reminded me that the United States sets the example for justice and fairness for the rest of the world," Ryan recounted in his historic Jan. 11 speech at Northwestern University School of Law. The governor, just 48 hours from the end of his single four-year term, then announced what Mandela, and the world, was anxiously waiting to hear.
"Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious — and therefore immoral — I no longer shall 'tinker with the machinery of death,'" he said, quoting Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman's 1994 indictment of the death penalty. "The legislature couldn't reform it. Lawmakers won't repeal it. But I will not stand for it. I must act."
With that, the white-haired former pharmacist commuted the sentences of Illinois' 163 death row inmates. The previous day he had granted outright pardons to four men awaiting execution.
What drove a rock-ribbed conservative Republican governor, former state co-chair of the Bush for President campaign and erstwhile death penalty supporter, to deliver the largest death row commutation in U.S. history? The answer lies in a potent mix of activism, grassroots education, crusading journalism, tireless legal work, and in a politician who simply refused to seek public approval by killing people.
The seeds of clemency were sown in 1977 when the Illinois legislature reinstated capital punishment. That same year, death penalty abolitionists formed the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. In 1990 when Illinois held its first execution since 1962 — putting Charles Walker to death by lethal injection — six activists from the coalition and other groups held a vigil outside the prison. Alice Miller, representing the national office of Amnesty International, carried a hand-lettered sign that read, "Thou shall not kill."
By the late '90s, more than 150 people were awaiting execution in Illinois. But as their ranks swelled, so did the exonerations. In 1996, after forensic testing proved his innocence, Carl Lawson became the state's ninth exonerated death row prisoner. Growing evidence that the state might kill an innocent person gave death penalty opponents an opportunity.
In 1997 a small group of activists suggested seeking a moratorium on executions. "Many activists were afraid of going down the road of something less than abolition," recounts Michael Heflin, then with Amnesty International's Midwest office. But after years of polite vigils, Heflin and other activists decided, "We could reach out and bring people with us who might not oppose the death penalty, but who were concerned that Illinois might risk executing innocent people."
The turning point came in 1999. Within a month of his January inauguration, Gov. George Ryan confronted the case of Anthony Porter. Porter had been on death row for 15 years for a double murder. Fifty hours before his execution, he was granted a reprieve by the Illinois Supreme Court. Arguably mentally retarded, Porter was ordered to undergo a competency hearing to determine if he could comprehend what was about to happen to him. Seizing the opportunity to re-open the case, a group of dogged investigators traveled to Alabama and interviewed the key witness, who recanted her testimony implicating Porter. They then tracked down the real killer and obtained a videotaped confession from him.
Far from vindicating the system, these lifesaving sleuths highlighted glaring flaws in the death penalty machinery. Mere undergraduate journalism students at Northwestern University, they had proved to be more effective advocates for justice than the police and courts combined. Their professor, David Protess, had been investigating wrongful convictions since his work as a reporter for the Chicago Lawyer in the '80s. Protess has passed on this challenge to successive groups of students ever since. In an emotional scene, Porter was released from jail and ran into the arms of Protess and his students.
That night, Dave Protess got a call from the newly installed governor. "I could tell that [Ryan] was deeply concerned on a personal level about how this could have happened, that he could have executed an innocent man," says Protess. "There began the education of George Ryan."
That education did not stop Ryan from denying clemency to Andrew Kokoraleis, who that March became the only prisoner executed on Ryan's watch. The governor confessed that it was "an agonizing decision."
Meanwhile, anti-death penalty activists turned up the pressure. Amnesty International co-sponsored a high-profile press conference in late 1998, at which former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon and other top political leaders endorsed the idea of the moratorium. In November of that year, 28 exonerated former death prisoners and 1,200 lawyers, academics, and activists attended the National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty at the Northwestern University School of Law. The event focused international attention on the systemic flaws in the U.S. criminal justice system.
In November 1999, as the number of exonerations mounted, the Chicago Tribune published a devastating five-part investigative series. Reporters Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong chronicled a sordid history of capital convictions based on jailhouse informants, overzealous prosecutors, abusive cops, and inept defense attorneys.
The series "was the first time anybody looked under the rock," says Mills. "For the governor, there were nuggets there for him to grab onto. A lot of people could understand it: jailhouse snitches, bad lawyers — this was not complicated. Ryan was a pharmacist by trade, and he said that if he was right on his prescriptions only half the time, he'd be out of business."
By January 2000, doubts about capital punishment in Illinois began to overwhelm Ryan. Thanks to relentless work by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern, the Tribune journalists, Protess and his students, and a mounting public education campaign, Illinois exonerated its 13th death row prisoner, Steve Manning. With the vindication of Manning, an ex-Chicago cop condemned solely on the word of a jailhouse informant, Illinois gained the dubious distinction of having exonerated more death row convicts than the dozen it had executed since reinstating the death penalty in 1977.
The Illinois experience is being repeated in states around the country. Some 123 death row inmates in the United States have been exonerated, according to the Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law that uses DNA testing to establish post-conviction innocence. A Columbia University study revealed that serious errors occur in 68 percent of death penalty cases, resulting in the release or re-sentencing of those convicted.
On Jan. 31, 2000, Ryan made national news when he announced a moratorium pending an investigation into the fairness of capital punishment. Many expected the bipartisan commission he appointed — stacked with ex-cops, former prosecutors, and pro-death penalty judges — to paper over the problems. But in April 2002 the commission report declared, "No system ... could guarantee absolutely that an innocent person is never again sentenced to death." A majority of the commission recommended that the death penalty be abolished.
When the legislature failed to enact any of the commission's 85 proposed reforms in 2002, pressure increased on Ryan to grant blanket clemency for the 167 men on death row. Amnesty International and the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty coordinated efforts to send the governor more than 20,000 postcards urging clemency, and they sponsored a number of anti-death penalty conferences, including several that the governor attended.
Then in October, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board held hearings in Chicago and Springfield to review clemency petitions from nearly every prisoner on death row. Prosecutors, seething over the prospect of commutations, got extensive press coverage alongside the emotional testimonies of victims' families. As the daily litany of tragedies wore on, Ryan began back-peddling from the commission's recommendation, saying he would probably just commute sentences on a case-by-case basis.
But the voices of another set of victims proved crucial. Jennifer Bishop lost her 25-year-old sister Nancy and brother-in-law to a 1990 double murder. A 16-year-old neighbor forced the couple into their basement, then shot the husband execution-style. Nancy, three months pregnant, pleaded for her life, only to be shot several times in the abdomen. As she lay dying, she scrawled in blood her familiar sign-off, ªU.
"Her last word on life was love, love in the face of evil," says Jennifer Bishop. Nancy's dying words galvanized her and her sister Jeanne. "When they started talking about a juvenile death penalty [for Nancy's killer] — killing children — we realized that would not honor her. We can't imagine making the death of another human being her memorial. We decided to end the cycle of violence."
The Bishop sisters joined Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), a national group of survivors that opposes the death penalty. Jennifer, who recently finished a term as national chair of MVFR, knew she must answer the victims' angry families who opposed commutations. In December MVFR sponsored "Victims' Voices," a conference at which 20 MVFR Illinois members spoke eloquently of the need for forgiveness. Ryan attended.
As Ryan's term neared its climactic conclusion, anti-death penalty crusaders turned up the heat. On Dec. 15 and 16 the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern held a gathering of 36 exonerated death row prisoners from around the country. The next day Amnesty International co-sponsored a "Dead Man Walking" relay from the state's execution facility to the governor's office in Chicago. Thirty of the exonerated each walked for one mile, carrying a letter urging Ryan to commute all death sentences to life in prison without parole. These events culminated with a special performance of The Exonerated, a play about wrongfully convicted death row inmates that starred Richard Dreyfuss, Danny Glover, and Mike Farrell. After reading a letter from a real-life exonerated man, Richard Dreyfuss addressed the governor, who sat in the audience.
"We want to recognize the leadership and just plain courage of Governor Ryan," Dreyfuss said to audience applause. Ryan, who left the theater saying his decision about clemency was "the toughest thing that I've ever had to do in my life," soon announced that blanket clemency was "on the table."
On January 10, the day before Ryan announced the mass commutation, he pardoned four men on death row. Among them was Aaron Patterson, who was framed and tortured by police in 1989 for the murder of an elderly couple. For Patterson, Ryan's actions are intensely personal. As an African American and former gang member, Patterson knew a hard truth: "Ain't nobody going to be sympathetic to me and my cause." Now freed after 13 years in a 6-by-9 foot cage, he declares, "I'd still be on death row if not for the governor."
Patterson says of his brief time on the outside, "It has been bittersweet. I left people behind. I'm glad to be out. But I need to go back and throw the rope back to let another brother climb out of the pit."
Why did George Ryan, this most unlikely crusader, enlist himself in the ranks of death-penalty opponents? Critics have charged that Ryan was simply trying to burnish his scandal-tarnished image. Some 50 of his subordinates from his terms as secretary of state have been indicted on corruption charges, and Ryan himself is the subject of a federal probe that could lead to indictment.
But George Brooks, director of advocacy for the prison and jail ministry of the Archdiocese of Chicago and board member of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty, scoffs at the notion. "It's ludicrous to think that the governor tried to clean his record with this. You'd pick any other issue than the death penalty. Those you are giving voice to are despised by society. There's no great political benefit to doing this."
Nor has Ryan pleased the abolitionists who think that he did not go far enough and condemn the system outright.
Ryan declined to be interviewed for this story, but close associates reveal a governor shaken by the power to play God and determined not to execute any innocent people.
"We had no choice," says Ryan's press secretary, Dennis Cullotan, of the decision to grapple with the death penalty. After the Tribune series and the exonerations focused public attention on how often the innocent had been condemned, Cullotan said, "He could either stand and deliver or duck and cover. And he chose to stand and deliver."
"Has he come to believe that the death penalty is immoral?" Cullotan, a former student of Dave Protess, asks rhetorically. "I think probably in his heart that he is close to that point. But he didn't try to look at this as a lofty moral debate or an academic debate. He simply asked, 'Is this right? ... Could we have the ultimate nightmare here of executing the wrong person?' Because there can be no greater miscarriage of justice than for the state to take the life of a man for a crime he didn't commit. And there are just too many ways that could happen in Illinois."
Asked if a fair death penalty is possible, Cullotan — whose father, brother, and uncles were all police officers — sighs deeply and admits to "raging ambivalence." After a long silence, he adds, "No, I don't think it's possible to ensure that you will never execute an innocent man or woman. And that to me is frightening."
Even though America's death rows held 3,692 people as of Jan. 1, the conversion of George Ryan is already having ripple effects around the country. Of the 38 states, including Illinois, that still have capital punishment, more than 10 will consider legislation this year to either abolish or temporarily halt executions.
Activists have earned a share of the credit. "Activists created the public space that allowed Ryan to act," said Robert Schultz, head of the abolition program in Amnesty's Midwest office. "If people don't organize and speak out, politicians will never know the depth of popular opposition to the death penalty."
"The bottom line is it all comes down to understanding the facts, to education," says Jane Bohman of the Illinois Coalition. "The only way that the death penalty can survive is if no one tells the truth about it. It's a house of cards. And it's just a matter of time before we end it."
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