Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Friday, January 10, 2003, was a turning point for American justice. It was a cold morning in Chicago. Lake Michigan heaved a thick, frosty breath over the city. The automobile arteries into the citys business core were already full. Traffic inched along as the elevated L-train rattled through a canyon of skyscrapers. The grinding of metal against metal had barely faded behind a passing train when a black van pulled alongside the curb in front of DePaul University Law School on Jackson Boulevard. Commuters rushed by, barely noticing as the governor of Illinois emerged from the vehicle, staff assistants and a state trooper trailing behind him. They couldnt have known the grave importance of Governor George Ryans mission that day nor the agonizing journey that had led him to this speech at DePaul. Even his closest associates, while aware that the withering pressure had claimed the governors sense of humor in the last few days, still did not know of his final decision.
In the few feet from the curb to the front door of the law school the party passed a newsstand. All the local papers carried the story. The Chicago Sun-Times quoted sources that said the governor would pardon some death row inmates in his last three days in office. The Chicago Tribune had also picked up the leak, but its columnists wondered if Ryan would go through with such a radical act. After all, such pardons would be unprecedented. No one could remember a governor ever doing anything like this. It would be a slap in the face of the entire justice system. Ryan would be declaring that Americas entire system of lawyers, trial courts, and appellate courts built on centuries of English common law could not handle the job. He would be taking justice out of their hands and redefining it himself. Quite an act of bravado, especially for a non-lawyer.
The governor walked straight to the elevators, offering a quick and easy wave to the security guard. He had been a popular governor and would have easily won re-election but for a nagging litany of corruption charges during his tenure as Illinois secretary of state. This would be one of two final speeches in a long career in Illinois politics.
A sense of finality hung in the air as the group made its way down a corridor on the eighth floor. They entered the lecture hall. George Ryan strode from the back of the room down its sloping floor to a podium at the center, where he would stand like Cicero lecturing in an ancient amphitheater. Some fifty tables marched up around him in a tiered pattern, filled with young law students, many swiveling back and forth nervously on their attached seats.
Ryan looked up at their eager faces. He was an approachable, jolly sort of man. His short-cropped gray-white hair topped a round face giving him the warm look of a beloved grandfather. But today his face was rigid and serious. He frowned down at his notes. Then George Ryan took a deep breath and made history.
His first words from the podium, carried live on radio and recorded by an array of television cameras, made it clear that he had chosen to leave a remarkable legacy. He would pardon four inmates sitting on death row, he said, because, It was the right thing to do.
Three years ago, Ryan said. I was faced with startling information. We had exonerated not one, not two, but thirteen men from death row. They were found innocent. Innocent of the charges for which they were sentenced to die. Can you imagine? We nearly killed innocent people. We nearly injected them with a cocktail of deadly poisons so that they could die in front of witnesses on a gurney in the states death chamber. Thats a pretty gruesome picture.
There was no ruling from the Illinois Supreme Court to back Ryan up, no opinion from the states attorney general. This was the personal judgment of a former pharmacist and aging statesman who had come to his decision the hard way, as the final arbiter over the lives of men he might have to send to their deaths.
George Ryan had only two days left in his term. He could have escaped this difficult decision and driven off toward his hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, leaving the heavy responsibility to the next governor. But Ryan knew there was a serious problem with the Illinois system and that to walk away would have been a dereliction of duty. And so he chose to sign off as a whistleblower, knowing he would be pilloried by relatives of the victims of death row inmates, death penalty proponents, and many in law enforcement. He most likely did not know he would also be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and would win praise from governments and individuals around the world. Either way, his decision to speak out instead of remaining quiet was an act of immense courage.
Why did he do it? The short answer is that George Ryan felt deeply betrayed; the system of justice he had always trusted was not working and maybe never did work the way we all had been led to believe.
Governor Ryan recited the statistics for his audience: Half of the nearly 300 capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or re-sentencing. Nearly half! he emphasized. Thirty-three of the Death Row inmates were represented at trial by an attorney who had later been disbarred or at some point suspended from practicing law.
Im not a lawyer, he said, but I dont think you need to be one to be appalled by those statistics. I have one question: How does that happen?
The question was the cry of a layman who may not know the details of habeas corpus or be able to translate res judicata, but who has a common sense of right and wrong.
How does that happen?
What was happening in the process of determining the truth that prevented justice from prevailing? In an assembly plant, the foreman could check the robots or the individual parts being welded together. Quality control employees could stop the line if they detected anything amiss. If a defective product reached the end of the line the whole assembly might shut down to find and fix the problem. Why werent such checks and balances working in death penalty trials? Why wasnt someone shutting down the line?
The governors voice rose as the emotion of sleepless nights spilled out: We had executed twelve people since capital punishment was reinstated here in Illinois in 1977. With the thirteenth exonerated inmate in January of 2000, we had released more innocent men from Death Row than those hopefully guilty people we had executed. Three years ago, I described it as a shameful scorecard. Truly shameful. So I did the only thing I could. I called for what is in effect a moratorium. A lot of people called that courageous. It wasnt. It was just the right thing to do. How do you let innocent people march to Death Row without somebody saying, Stop the show?
Three years before, George Ryan had stopped the show. And now, with this extraordinary act of gubernatorial pardon, he was assuring himself a place in the annals of American history. No other inmate had been pardoned while sitting on death row still appealing his case. Ryan pardoned four. And there was more to come.
The next day, January 11, under another cold Chicago sky, Governor George Ryan upstaged himself by commuting the death sentences of 164 other death row inmates, replacing the threat of execution with a sentence of life in prison without parole. Among those inmates were psychopathic killers, sexual predators, organized crime hit men, and the most deviant kinds of criminals. Their crimes challenge the imagination of how terrible and cruel one human can be to another. Jacqueline Williams cut the full-term fetus from the belly of a pregnant woman she and Fedell Caffey had killed because she wanted a baby. Although the baby lived and was kidnapped, the two other children of the victim were killed. Daniel Edwards lured Steve Small, the publisher of the
