Guest host Chris Bury on ABC's "Nightline" Monday asked former Gov. George Ryan a question that won't go away.

Bury--Some of the victims' families are saying that you should have looked at (Illinois Death Row) cases on an individual basis, considered the individual facts, as opposed to issuing this blanket commutation. I'd like you to address that.

Ryan--I have done each of these cases on an individual basis, and that's what drove me to do a blanket commutation.

Bury--You're saying, Governor, that every one of these cases . . . every single one of them was judged on the merits?

Ryan--Well, that isn't what I said. . . . I just said I went over every one of those cases. Now, how do I cherry-pick those cases when I know there are innocent people going to Death Row? How do I say this one's guilty and this one isn't? . . . I looked at every one of those cases. I couldn't tell you which ones were innocent and which ones were guilty.

Oprah Winfrey tried again Wednesday, asking Ryan on her show, "Why couldn't you look at each case? There are some cases where you said you knew people were guilty."

"I assume people were guilty," Ryan said. "But you know, we had 13 people exonerated who had all been found guilty by a jury of their peers. Without question they were guilty. Every appellate decision they got was the fact that they were guilty. Clear to the Supreme Court. Only to be found that they were innocent. . . . I didn't know how I could cherry-pick."

Questions about the case-by-case versus blanket approach won't go away because such attempts to reconcile them aren't persuasive.

Case-by-case, which Ryan so often promised, suggests an examination of each death sentence and a ruling up or down on each inmate.

Blanket, which he ended up taking when he emptied Death Row on Saturday during his last weekend in office, suggests a wholesale approach to the rulings of a system "haunted by the demon of error," as he put it. One could lead to the other, of course.

But Ryan hasn't made the connection. Though he has repeatedly referred to the "exhaustive" and "in-depth, individualized review" of "each and every case" performed by him and his advisers, he hasn't supplied in-depth, individualized critiques of each case.

Instead, he has supported his move by citing general flaws with the death penalty, such as the "cherry-picking" that separates those who deserve to live from those who deserve to die. The near impossibility of perfecting such choices ought to have been obvious to him on the day he declared a moratorium on executions nearly three years ago or at least by April when his Commission on Capital Punishment filed its stinging 208-page report.

Yes, the capital justice system, like all institutions, is as fallible and corruptible as the human beings who run it. Yes, it picks out a few convicted murderers to be executed and leaves the majority to rot behind bars, and there are too many variables ever to make the condemnation process morally pristine.

But such flaws are fundamental, part of the deal that supporters of capital punishment accept as the cost of seeking blood vengeance. No amount of tweaking and reforming will ever fully correct them. Yet Ryan shrugged and waffled, putting things off and on burners and tables while giving the families of victims the apparently false hope that he was weighing the issues and evidence in their particular cases.

Then, in effect, he announced that the premise of his moratorium on executions was correct all along--our death penalty system is way too screwed up to execute anyone based on its judgments. I'm satisfied with the result. The state has shown it does not deserve the power to kill even those who deserve to die.

But I'm not satisfied with the explanations.

What took Ryan so long to grasp the truths he now proclaims? And now that he proclaims them, how can he possibly say he's still undecided about abolition? What doubts did he have, particularly after the commission report came out, and what specific evidence resolved them when? If there is no discrepancy between the case-by-case and blanket approaches because each death sentence fell short of Ryan's standards for accuracy and fairness, how exactly did they fall short?

Ryan himself may go away, but until he answers them, these questions won't.