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| Illinois Death Row Sentences Commuted |
| By AP |
| Published: 01/14/2003 |
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Calling the death penalty process 'arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral,' Gov. George Ryan cleared Illinois' death row Saturday, commuting 167 condemned inmates' sentences in the broadest attack on the death penalty in decades. Ryan's decision came three years after he temporarily halted state executions to examine the system's fairness. 'I had to act,' he said. 'Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.' The move was quickly denounced by prosecutors, the incoming governor and relatives of some murder victims; one relative said Ryan 'has killed them all over again.' But it was met with jubilation at Northwestern University, where a who's who of anti-death penalty activists attended Ryan's speech. 'Gov. Ryan has taught us what leading truly looks like,' said Lawrence C. Marshall, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern, the school whose journalism students have helped exonerate some condemned inmates. The mass commutation was the sharpest blow to capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1972, forcing states to redraw their laws to make them more equitable. About 600 sentences were reduced to life with that decision, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Most of the 167 Illinois inmates will now serve life without parole. Ryan also reduced the sentences of three men; they could eventually be released. In the few cases where death sentences were under review, the maximum penalty will also be life without parole. The announcement came just before the Republican Ryan leaves office. The Illinois State's Attorneys Association, a group of county prosecutors, will investigate ways to challenge Ryan's actions, said the group's president, Champaign County State's Attorney John Piland. But several prosecutors acknowledged there may be little they can do about the governor's broad clemency power, short of an amendment to the state constitution. Ryan said he sympathized with the families of the men, women and children who had been murdered, but he felt he had to act. 'I am not prepared to take the risk that we may execute an innocent person,' he wrote in an overnight letter to the victims' families warning them of his plans. That reasoning didn't add up for prosecutors or for relatives of some victims. Said Peoria County State's Attorney Kevin Lyons: 'The great, great majority of these people that have petitioned for commutation ... did not even contest their guilt.' With death row inmates he had recently pardoned sitting in the audience as he spoke Saturday, Ryan framed the death penalty issue as 'one of the great civil rights struggles of our time.' Ryan had halted all executions in the state nearly three years earlier after courts found that 13 Illinois death row inmates had been wrongly convicted since capital punishment resumed in 1977 a period when 12 other inmates were executed. He said studies conducted since that moratorium was issued had only raised more questions about the how the death penalty was imposed. He cited problems with trials, sentencing, the appeals process and the state's 'spectacular failure' to reform the system. Other governors have issued similar moratoriums and commutations, but nothing on the scale of what Ryan has done. The most recent blanket clemency came in 1986 when the governor of New Mexico commuted the death sentences of the state's five death row inmates. Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, who last year issued the country's only other moratorium on state executions, has no plans to pardon or commute the sentences of any death row inmate before leaving office Wednesday, spokesman Chuck Porcari said. |
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