Ryan speaks at DePaul University on Friday and Northwestern
University on Saturday. The addresses are widely expected to cap
Ryan's three-year campaign to highlight flaws in the state's death
penalty system, which began when he declared a moratorium on
executions in January 2000.
"I don't think he would come and give a speech that was going to
greatly disappoint us," said Rob Warden, executive director of the
Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions.
Ryan, a Republican, has said he will announce by the end of his
term whether he will grant clemency to any or all of the state's 160
death row inmates. He leaves office at noon Monday.
Ryan's suggestion last year that he might grant blanket clemency
to every death row inmate prompted nearly all of them to seek mercy.
That led to a controversial series of hearings in the fall that
replayed some of the state's most gruesome murders. After the
hearings, Ryan said he was no longer inclined to grant blanket
clemency.
He has been under relentless pressure ever since from people on
both sides of the issue — families of inmates and crime victims, law
professors, prosecutors and politicians.
In recent weeks, Ryan has returned to anti-death penalty
activism, twice announcing pardons of wrongfully convicted people
who were no longer in jail.
DePaul University is home to an anti-death penalty center, while
Northwestern has spearheaded the anti-death penalty movement in
Illinois. Scholars at its law school have fought on behalf of
inmates, and Northwestern journalism students conducted
investigations that freed death row convicts.
Even as a corruption scandal plagued his administration, Ryan,
who did not seek re-election, could always count on a warm welcome
at Northwestern.
Increasing the optimism of death penalty opponents is the
invitation extended by Ryan to relatives of death row inmates to one
or both of the speeches.
"The governor's office invited me to the speech (Friday) and
they're giving me a special seat," said Costella Cannon, the mother
of Frank Bounds, who died of a heart attack in 1998 while on death
row.
