Governor commutes 167 death sentences

His decision, which came three years after he temporarily halted state executions to examine the system’s fairness, was quickly denounced by prosecutors, the incoming governor and relatives of some murder victims.

“Every one of the victims, he has killed them all over again,” said Cathy Drobney. Her daughter Bridget was killed in 1985 by Robert Turner, whose sentence was commuted.

It was a sharp contrast from the jubilant reaction at Northwestern University, where journalism students investigating Illinois death row cases have helped exonerate some inmates.

“Governor Ryan has taught us what leading truly looks like,” said Lawrence Marshall, director of the university’s Centre on Wrongful Convictions. “This is greatness, my friends.”

The mass commutation was the sharpest blow to capital punishment since the US Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1972, forcing states to redraw their laws to make them more equitable.

The commutation came two days before the Republican leaves office as one of the nation’s most influential anti-death penalty advocates – a legacy he has embraced even as an ongoing federal corruption investigation ruined his chances for re-election and made him a pariah within his own party.

Ryan said he sympathised with the families of those who had been murdered, but he felt he had to act.

“I am not prepared to take the risk that we may execute an innocent person,” he wrote in an overnight letter to the victims’ families warning them of his plans.

But that reasoning did not add up for prosecutors.

“The great, great majority of these people that have petitioned for commutation ... did not even contest their guilt,” said Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons. “He’s disingenuous when he says that certainty is the issue.”

With death row inmates he had recently pardoned sitting in the audience as he spoke on Saturday, Ryan called the death penalty issue as “one of the great civil rights struggles of our time.”

“Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error – error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die,” Ryan said. “What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?”

Ryan halted all executions in the state nearly three years ago, after courts found that 13 Illinois death row inmates had been wrongly convicted since capital punishment resumed in 1977 – a period when 12 other inmates were executed.

He said studies conducted since that moratorium was issued had only raised more questions about the how the death penalty was imposed. He cited problems with trials, sentencing, the appeals process and the state’s “spectacular failure” to reform the system.

“Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious – and therefore immoral – I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” he said.

Other governors have issued similar moratoriums and commutations, but nothing on the scale of what Ryan has done. The most recent blanket clemency came in 1986 when the governor of New Mexico commuted the death sentences of the state’s five death row inmates.

Maryland governor Parris Glendening, who last year issued the country’s only other moratorium on state executions, has no plans to pardon or commute the sentences of any death row inmate before leaving office on Wednesday, spokesman Chuck Porcari said.

Corrections Department spokesman Sergio Molina said Ryan had signed commutation orders for 167 people – 156 on death row and others in jails awaiting hearings or sentencing for other crimes.

Within a week the department will start moving prisoners out of the state’s two “condemned units” and into the general population of maximum-security prisons, Molina said.

All but three of those inmates now face life in prison without the possibility of parole, Ryan said. The three will get shorter sentences and could eventually be released from prison, though none will be released immediately.

Vern Fueling, whose son William was shot and killed in 1985 by a man now on death row, was outraged that the killer would be allowed to live.

“My son is in the ground for 17 years and justice is not done,” Fueling said. “This is like a mockery.”

Incoming governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, also criticised Ryan’s action, calling blanket clemency “a big mistake.”

“Each case should be reviewed individually,” Blagojevich said. “You’re talking about people who’ve committed murder.”

Ryan on Friday went a step further, issuing pardons for four men he said had been tortured by police into making false confessions.

A few hours later, Aaron Patterson, 38, walked out of prison a free man and ate his first steak in 17 years, while Madison Hobley and Leroy Orange spent time with their families.

Stanley Howard, 40, the fourth man pardoned on Friday, remained in prison. He had also been convicted of a separate crime for which he was still serving time. All four had been convicted in murder cases.

“It’s a dream come true, finally. Thank God that this day has finally come,” Hobley, 42, said as he left the Pontiac Correctional Centre.

Orange, 52, walked out of Cook County Jail looking a bit dazed with his two daughters by his side.

“Thank you with all my heart and please do something for the remaining group on death row,” he said, addressing Ryan.

Patterson’s mother, Jo Ann, said she was overwhelmed when she heard the news.

“I don’t believe in miracles but this is a miracle,” she said.