Former Illinois Governor Defends His New Stance on Death Penalty

Matthew Hersh

"I always thought an innocent man going to death row was the stuff of Hollywood," said former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, "but the judicial system is absolutely broken, and I'm convinced it can't be repaired."

In a lecture sponsored by the student-based Princeton Justice Project at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Monday night, Gov. Ryan spoke of his change of opinion regarding the death penalty and why he commuted 167 Illinois death row inmates only days before leaving office in January of 2003.

His decision affected 156 inmates on death row and 11 others who had been sentenced to death but were not yet in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections because they were waiting for new trials or sentences.

In 2000, the governor placed a moratorium on all Illinois executions until flaws in the judicial system could be revealed.

"I was a strong supporter of the death penalty. I believed it was an important part of our system, believed it was a necessary part of keeping crime under control, and even naively believed that it was a deterrent to crime," he said.

Gov. Ryan, a Republican who did not run for re-election in November 2002, said that during his 30 years in the Illinois State Legislature, he never questioned the policies governing the death penalty, nor was he ever asked. "It was just one of those things that was in the abstract, it was just there," he said.

He first considered the morality of being part of a government "that is in the business of killing people," when one of his colleagues in the legislature asked him how willing he would be if he had to physically throw "the switch."

"Well, I didn't want to do that. I didn't want anything to do with that," Gov. Ryan said, but at the time, he said he remained undeterred, adding that he still thought the death penalty was "a necessary part of the process."

"Little did I know, that some years later, I would become the executioner for the State of Illinois," he said. "That's what happened."

Before being elected governor in November 1998, Gov. Ryan said he began to see flaws surface as he became closer to participating in the execution process.

After a group of student journalists from Northwestern University began to expose cracks in a case involving death row inmate Anthony Porter in the late 1990s, broader media attention began to focus on flaws in that particular case. Gov. Ryan, also, began to pay attention to the case.

"My position started to change when Anthony Porter was released from prison in February 1999 after spending 16 years on death row as an innocent man," he said.

Mr. Porter was convicted in 1982 of a Chicago couple's murder in the city's South Side section. Upon his release from prison in 1999, the Chief Cook County Criminal Judge Thomas Fitzgerald pointed to the research carried out by five university students under the guidance of Northwestern University Professor David Protess.

Mr. Porter was widely believed to be incapable of understanding his sentence due to a low IQ.

Gov. Ryan said that this case highlighted the inconsistencies in the system and said it suggested that studies needed to be carried out before more executions were to take place.

"This case wasn't the first case with such injustice," he said. "Nine other innocent men prior to Mr. Porter were also exonerated by the courts."

"When Anthony Porter was released from death row, I didn't know exactly what to think," Gov. Ryan said, adding "he had been through the process of review, and still after 16 years, they couldn't get it right."

That event signaled a complete change in policy for Gov. Ryan.

"Quite frankly, everything that I believed about the criminal justice system came into question, and I said to myself 'how does that happen in this country?'"

"If it hadn't been for those journalism students, Anthony Porter would be six feet under ground today," he said.

In 1977, when Gov. Ryan was a member of the legislature, he had voted to renew the state's death penalty policy. He said that between that vote and when he placed the moratorium on the policy in 2000, 25 people had been placed on death row. Over that time, 13, more than half, of those inmates were exonerated.

"I ask what kind of justice that is," Gov. Ryan said. "It was a shameful scorecard to be right only about 48 percent of the time," adding, "in any walk of life, society doesn't tolerate a high margin of error."

He also expanded on the representation received by many accused criminals when standing trial. By the time of the moratorium, Mr. Ryan said, 33 of the 167 death row inmates were represented by lawyers who had later been disbarred or suspended from practicing law.

"These lawyers were drunk, asleep, on drugs, didn't make the right motions: they didn't know what they were doing," he said. "But they were defending a person in danger of losing his life in the courts of America."

In addition to the dichotomy in treatment between class systems and those who can afford better representation, indeed, do receive better representation, the governor cited 33 murder cases where the the defendant was black and convicted by an all-white jury.

"What happened to a jury of peers? How does that happen?" he asked.

Of those convicted of murder in the 23 years since Gov. Ryan voted to renew the death penalty laws, 46 people were sentenced to die based on testimony of jailhouse informants, he said.

"This is the most unreliable, and unfair form of testimony possible," he added. "I don't know how I could have let that system go on."

In the end, Gov. Ryan based his commuting of 167 Illinois death row inmates on the facts and inconsistencies he had seen in the state's criminal justice system, saying that the system should be studied before more people fall victim to a "flawed process."

"If you can't do something and not feel good about it, then you shouldn't be in office at all," he said. "What I can't understand is why it takes so long to get it right."