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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Gov. Ryan May Commute Death Sentences |
Current rating: 0 |
by Kevin McDermott
(No verified email address) |
05 Mar 2002
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Another important story left out of the News-Gazette.
It's interesting to here that a lack of people being put to death will lead to "a crisis of confidence in the legal system". From what I can tell, it's the system itself which has generated a lack of confidence, not Gov. Ryan. And it is extremely disappointing that among six candidates for governor from the two major parties, there is not one who has the courage to raise their voice against the madness of killing people to prove that killing is wrong. They all claim to still support the death penalty. |
Post-Dispatch Springfield Bureau
03/03/2002 07:36 PM
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Gov. George Ryan has stunned both sides of the national death penalty debate, saying he will review the 163 pending death sentences in Illinois and could commute them all before he leaves office next January.
"If government can't get this right, it ought not be in the business of passing such final, irreversible judgment," Ryan said in a speech Friday.
A mass commutation - essentially resentencing all condemned inmates, presumably to life in prison - would go beyond Ryan's historic death penalty freeze. It would keep those inmates now on death row from being executed even after Ryan's successor is sworn in.
Some death penalty supporters say it opens the possibility of a crisis of confidence in the legal system.
"It would be a slap in the face to every police officer, every victim of every murderer . . . every juror who ever rendered a verdict," said Madison County State's Attorney William Haine. ". . . It's an act that would strike at the heart of the whole legal system. I can't believe he's considering it."
But death penalty opponents said a mass commutation of death sentences would complete a crucial conversion that began two years ago in Ryan and in many others. In January 2000, Ryan - then a death penalty supporter - issued his now-famous freeze on executions, in the wake of a spate of wrongful death sentences.
"You have a governor here who has very clearly taken a look at the system and determined that it was broken," said Madison County Public Defender John Rekowski. "He didn't come in ideologically opposed to it. He concluded what any fair-minded person would, that the system is flawed."
Ryan told a conference on capital punishment in Oregon on Friday that he would review the files of all 163 death row inmates and consider commuting their sentences.
"We must never allow an innocent man or woman to be killed by the state for a crime they did not commit," Ryan said in a keynote speech at the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon. "That to me is a nightmare. A 99 percent accuracy rate isn't good enough."
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune on Saturday, Ryan said a blanket commutation of all 163 death sentences is "not something that's out of the question."
Ryan spokesman Dennis Culloton on Sunday confirmed that a blanket commutation of all 163 death row occupants was part of "a whole range of options" Ryan is considering.
Culloton said Ryan would make his decision after he received a final report from a commission on death penalty reform, expected this spring.
Illinois law gives the governor the right to pardon or commute the sentences of condemned prisoners. Though the power has been used in the past in individual cases in Illinois and other death penalty states, Ryan's suggestion of a mass commutation of all pending death sentences is apparently unprecedented in Illinois.
Haine, the Madison County state's attorney, predicted that a mass commuting of death sentences could lead to a loss of confidence in the justice system in Illinois.
"It would be a terrible act by the chief law enforcement officer of the state," said Haine. "Victims have a right to expect that a sentence rendered will be final."
Don Weber, an assistant to Haine and a death penalty proponent, argued: "There are probably 90 to 95 percent of people on death row where there is no question of their guilt. Stop the (executions) of the ones that are questionable. That's fine."
But he said that the notion of commuting all death sentences because of the problems with a few cases was preposterous.
Illinois has freed 13 people from death row since reinstating the death penalty in 1977 - one more than the state has executed in that time.
Ryan's freeze prevents any scheduled executions from being carried out until the pending review of the system is complete.
In 1996, then-Gov. Jim Edgar commuted the sentence of Guinevere Garcia, who killed her husband, from death to life in prison.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Copyright 2002 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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