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— By Dominic Evans

LONDON (Reuters) - Human rights watchdog Amnesty International urged President Bush Sunday to take a "moral stand" abolishing the death penalty after the Illinois governor dramatically emptied that state's death row.

The New York Times said Governor George Ryan's announcement Saturday sparing the lives of more than 150 convicted men and women was the largest emptying of a death row in U.S. history.

Ryan reduced prisoners' sentences to a maximum of life in prison without parole.

London-based Amnesty, which says the scale of executions in the world's most powerful democracy puts it in the same league as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran, said Ryan's announcement offered Bush a golden opportunity.

"This is a chance for President Bush to bring the United States in line with the world trend against the death penalty," Amnesty spokesman Kamal Samari told Reuters. "He could take a moral stand and signal that the death penalty is not the deterrent to criminals it is presented as."

Bush's home state of Texas has come under particular scrutiny for its frequent use of the death penalty. About 150 people were put to death during the six years Bush was Texas governor before he became president. He has defended the system.

"SIGNIFICANT STEP"

Ryan, a former staunch supporter of capital punishment who says he gradually turned against a "broken" system, lifted the death sentences just two days before he was due to leave office.

He acted following a review ordered nearly three years ago after investigations found 13 death row prisoners were innocent.

Samari said Ryan's decision marked a "significant step in the struggle against the death penalty" and urged governors in U.S. states still implementing the death penalty to follow suit.

Illinois is one of 38 states with death penalty laws. The federal government also has the death penalty.

"This is a governor who himself was a proponent of the death penalty, who then found that the system is faulty and that he has on his conscience the fact that innocent people have been executed or might have been executed."

Amnesty, a constant critic of the death penalty in the United States, marked world Human Rights Day last month by drawing attention to the 600 people it said had been put to death there in the last decade.

Among those executed last year were a mentally ill man, several people whose legal representation was inadequate, prisoners whose guilt remained in doubt, a Mexican denied his consular rights and a Pakistani abducted by U.S. agents ignoring human rights safeguards, it said.

They also included three offenders who were under 18 at the time of the crime -- making them the only three child offenders known to have been put to death anywhere in 2002.

"It is an irony that the world's superpower is not taking a lead on moral issues," Samari said.

TUTU WELCOME

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had written to Ryan appealing for mercy to be shown to condemned inmates, welcomed the Illinois governor's decision.

"This is fantastic news," said Lavinia Crawford-Browne, a spokeswoman for Tutu's office in South Africa. "His feeling would be that the death penalty is vengeance, it's not justice."

In Kenya, sociology professor Katama Mkangi who was imprisoned without trial in the 1980s for human rights work, described the commuting of the sentences as "a breath of fresh air in a rotten system."

"His decision is a wake up call for the United States justice system to catch up with the rest of civilization."

The United States and Japan are the only industrialized democracies in which the death penalty is still used.

While opinion polls indicate most Americans still favor capital punishment, support has been eroding and the American Bar Association has called for a national moratorium.

From 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated, until the end of 2002 there have been 820 U.S. executions, 71 of them last year. There are nearly 3,700 men and women under death sentence in the United States currently.

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