Former South African president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond
Tutu influenced Illinois Governor George Ryan in his landmark decision to
empty his state's death row, The Sunday Independent reported.
Both Mandela and Tutu made calls to Ryan before his January 11
decision, in which he granted blanket clemency to all 167 inmates facing
execution in the midwestern US state.
"I called him (Ryan) about our experience in South Africa and the fact
that we abolished the death penalty," Mandela told the paper from his home
in Maputo, where he is spending time with his wife Graca Machel.
"I appealed to him to withdraw the death sentences and he agreed to do
so almost immediately."
Mandela said last week through a spokeswoman: "The death sentence is a
barbaric act. I hope the whole of the US will follow Governor Ryan's
example on commuting the death sentence."
Mandela, 84, himself faced the death penalty during his terrorism trial
under apartheid in 1964. He was eventually sentenced to life, spending 18
of his 27 years in prison on Robben Island before his release in 1990.
In his departing speech as Illinois governor at the Northwestern
University College of Law last weekend, Ryan said he also had a call from
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, the paper reported.
Ryan said the cleric told him that "to take a life when a life has been
lost is revenge, it is not mercy" and that justice allowed for mercy,
clemency and compassion.
"These virtues are not weakness," Ryan said Tutu had told him.
- AFP
