 |
After years of soul searching, Ryan
decides not to `play God'
By Steve Mills
Tribune staff
reporter
Published January 12,
2003
On Friday, with
less than three days left in office and the biggest announcement
still ahead of him, Gov. George Ryan came to a decision.
He
was sitting on a couch in his 16th-floor office at the James R.
Thompson Center, a lifetime spent in state government boxed up
around him. He was being pitched yet again--this time by someone who
wanted to persuade him that a particular inmate should not be
spared.
By then, Ryan was
strongly leaning toward granting blanket commutations, clearing
Death Row. Earlier that day, he had announced that he was pardoning
four Death Row inmates.
He realized then that he could not
separate one inmate from another. That, he said in an interview
Saturday, would be "playing God." The decision, he said, came to him
"kind of quietly," turning three years of deliberation on a subject
that had been nearly foreign to him into a historic declaration that
spared the lives of the 156 on Illinois' Death Row.
Behind
the scenes, however, things had been anything but quiet.
At
the Thompson Center, Ryan's staff of lawyers and other aides had
labored over the issue of a blanket commutation for months. Stacks
of case files were everywhere, particularly in Deputy Gov. Matt
Bettenhausen's office, a "war room" of sorts for the
discussions.
For Ryan, the debate had been boiled down to
eight thick white binders with 160 tabbed dividers--one for each
prisoner being held on Death Row. At night, on weekends, during
breaks in his schedule, the governor paged through the
binders.
Though everyone in Ryan's inner circle favored some
number of commutations, the question that repeatedly and inevitably
arose was just how many should be granted. Should it be all of
them--blanket commutations? Or were there some cases that were
beyond the pale and in which the prisoners deserved to be executed,
just as juries had ordered at trial?
"[I was] never really
believing as long as a week to 10 days ago that I would likely
commute these sentences. I didn't believe that I would do it
myself," Ryan said during his speech Saturday.
Ryan was
lobbied hard by the forces on both sides of the debate.
On
one side were prosecutors and victims' families, reliving the
gruesome details of the crimes committed by the state's Death Row
inmates over the past 25 years--a horrific chronicle of pain and
woe.
On the other side were defense attorneys and other
critics of capital punishment. They focused on the mistakes the
death penalty system has repeatedly made--the false confessions, the
DNA exonerations and authorities' failure to learn from the mounting
errors.
And they reached out to Ryan. As the governor ate a
corned beef sandwich at a deli, Nelson Mandela telephoned to ask
that he issue a blanket commutation. Archbishop Desmond Tutu
requested that the governor grant one as well.
In particular,
the attorneys at Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful
Convictions forged a close working relationship with a number of
Ryan's top aides, including Bettenhausen, Rick Guzman and spokesman
Dennis Culloton.
`We had to win his heart'
Rob Warden,
executive director of the center, said he viewed the job of
advocates for blanket commutations as winning the governor's
heart.
"We had to win his heart," he said. "That was our
job."
And they did. One night in Washington, Lawrence
Marshall of the Center on Wrongful Convictions spent more than an
hour speaking with Ryan after a speech, according to
aides.
Then the governor attended a performance of the play
"The Exonerated." The show played to a full house at a small local
theater, though the performance was intended largely just for
Ryan.
Leaving the theater, Ryan called the play
"gut-wrenching" and said it "just shows you what's wrong with the
system." He admitted that he had felt the pressure from both sides
in the death penalty debate and he said it was unlike anything he
had experienced.
"It's the toughest thing that I've ever had
to do in my life," he said.
One thing was certain, though.
Ryan, who after two weeks of emotional clemency hearings said he was
putting the idea of blanket commutations "off the table," left the
play saying blanket commutations now were "on the
table."
Prosecutors, particularly Cook County State's Atty.
Richard Devine, complained that they had no access to Ryan, though
Ryan said that he was available to meet with anyone who wanted to
discuss the issue.
Regularly, two top aides--Bettenhausen and
attorney Jean Templeton, who had worked with Ryan's Commission on
Capital Punishment--brought crucial breakdowns of the cases to the
governor.
Those breakdowns told Ryan how the men and women
currently on Death Row would have benefited from the 85 reforms his
Commission on Capital Punishment had recommended early last year.
They told him how many inmates had been hindered by incompetent
lawyers. They told him how many made claims of
innocence.
They did that for the last time Jan. 3--one week
before Ryan would conclude that his only decision was to issue a
blanket commutation.
Ryan absorbed the information, according
to aides, but said he was not ready to make a decision. He still had
to think. He still had to weigh what his conscience was telling him
to do.
"He left the meeting saying we were going to talk a
lot more about this," Culloton said. "The governor still felt there
was a lot of subjectivity, that you could never escape
that."
Drifting toward the decision
Indeed, the more
Ryan and his staff analyzed the cases, Culloton said, the more Ryan
seemed to drift toward issuing a blanket commutation.
Two
days later, late on Jan. 5, there was another critical discussion.
Aides were debating what to do with Death Row inmates who had killed
police officers. Ryan, aides said, viewed those murders as "the
worst of the worst."
But at the end of the evening, the issue
remained unresolved.
Again, Ryan told his staff there would
be more and more discussion.
And so it went.
Along the
way, Ryan had to decide who, if anyone, he was going to set free
with the strongest measure of clemency a governor has--a pardon.
Numerous inmates had claimed that they were innocent.
For a
time, William Heirens--the man convicted of three murders in the
1940s and the state's longest-serving prison inmate--was a
candidate. But then, according to sources familiar with the
discussions, Ryan and his staff decided that granting Heirens his
freedom sent the wrong message, that a life sentence meant something
less than life.
Ryan and his staff were more sure about some
of the cases handled by Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge. The evidence
in the cases, they said, was weak, particularly in four where there
was little evidence outside of a disputed confession--one the
inmates had claimed for years had been obtained through
torture.
"You're not supposed to have a weak case," said one
source in the governor's office. "You're supposed to have a strong
case, beyond a reasonable doubt."
Said Culloton: "The
governor had no doubt at all that in those cases there was not the
evidence you should have. He was convinced."
Ryan and his
staff also were bothered that prosecutors, especially in Cook
County, had seemed to learn little from the mounting number of
wrongful conviction cases. A comment from Devine's spokesman that
Ryan was "buying into the mantra" of defense attorneys who believe
the death penalty system is broken, made Ryan and his aides think
that prosecutors would never support genuine reform and were loath
to admit--much less learn from--errors they made. "What have they
done?" Ryan said in an interview. "Have they taken any
action?"
One night in the middle of the final week, Ryan and
his staff talked about cases such as Henry Brisbon's, the I-57
killer who was sentenced to death for a prison murder that occurred
after he had been sentenced for the highway murders.
But as
much as Ryan talked of carving out certain horrendous cases, there
was always a hitch. Ryan's staff knew that Scott Turow--the author,
attorney and member of the Commission on Capital Punishment--had
written that Brisbon's prison conviction was
questionable.
That, said Culloton, "kind of brought [the
governor] back to where he was with the picking and choosing, and he
felt uncomfortable doing that."
On Thursday, Ryan was leaning
strongly toward the blanket commutation. He and the staff began to
work on a letter to victims' families to notify them that he had
opted to issue the blanket commutation--a decision he knew they
would view as his "betrayal." The staff also began preparing the
commutation documents. Finally, on Friday, Ryan told the staff that
he had decided. The letters were ready to go; the commutations were
ready to be officially filed.
"If I'm going to err here,"
Ryan told the staff, "I'm going to err on the side of life."
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
|
|
Credit Consolidation.gif){kind=spacer}
