EDITORIAL
Ryan did the right thing -- justice
While the president has the
authority to send tens of thousands of men and women into battle, with
potentially millions of lives in the balance, it is the nation’s governors
who deal most intimately with death on a day-to-day basis.
It is to the governors, whose experiences are more typically
suited to building roads, filling potholes, and tending to parochial political
concerns, that we entrust the power of the gas chamber, the electric chair and
the syringe. It is a task few among us would relish. So the experience of
former Republican Gov. George Ryan of Illinois is worth attention.
For some governors, applying the death penalty seems to cause no
more concern than overseeing a new highway project.
In just six years, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush presided over
more than 150 executions in his state, despite detailed evidence that the
state’s justice system, particularly regarding defense of those on death
row, was deeply flawed.
Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton rushed home to Little Rock amid the
1992 New Hampshire primary to ensure that no last minute snafu would interfere
with that state’s execution of cop-killer Ricky Ray Rector, whose severe
mental disabilities were no bar to his death.
Over the objection of religious leaders in his state, newly
installed Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich, his hand barely free of the Bible on
which he swore his oath, rescinded that state’s death penalty moratorium.
Then there are those -- New York’s Mario Cuomo most
prominently -- who refuse to sate the public cry for vengeance. Cuomo refused
to allow the death penalty to be used in New York, and many believe he paid the
ultimate political price for those convictions when he lost in 1994 to George
Pataki, who campaigned heavily as an advocate of the death penalty. And now, we
have the strange case of former Gov. Ryan.
By all accounts, Ryan ran a deeply flawed administration. At best,
as Illinois secretary of state, Ryan was oblivious as his top aides, and state
house lobbyists looted the treasury and traded their offices and access for
private gain; at worst, though no charges have been brought against him, Ryan
was a central player in the scandals -- just another corrupt politician in a
state that produces them with some regularity.
That said, a funny thing happened to the
pharmacist-turned-governor. He came face-to-face with his state’s
“machinery of death.” And he refused to blink.
As he was departing office earlier this month, Ryan commuted the
death sentences of the 160 men and four women on Illinois’ death row.
Previously, following the revelation that 13 death row inmates were, in fact,
innocent of the murders they were said to have committed, Ryan placed a
moratorium on executions in the state. One man was two days from
state-administered lethal injection when the evidence clearing him came to
light.
Ryan appointed a blue-ribbon panel to make recommendations to
improve Illinois’ flawed justice system, and, when the state legislature
failed to enact any of those recommendations, took the dramatic step of
commuting the death sentences.
He cited his reasons:
• “Thirty-three of the death row inmates were
represented at trial by an attorney who had later been disbarred or at some
point suspended from practicing law.
• “Of the more than 160 death row inmates, 35
were African-American defendants who had been convicted or condemned to die not
by juries of their peers but by all-white juries.
• “More than two-thirds of the inmates on death
row were African-American.
• “And 46 inmates were convicted on the basis of
testimony from jailhouse informants.”
“To say it plainly,” Ryan continued, “the Illinois
capital punishment system is broken. It has taken innocent men to a hair’s
breadth escape from their unjust execution. Legislatures past have refused to
fix it. Our new legislature and our new governor must act to rid our state of
the shame of threatening the innocent with execution and the guilty with
unfairness.”
In commuting the death sentences, George Ryan did the right thing.
He did justice. One innocent man or woman killed by the government in our name
is one too many.
It is perhaps more difficult than ever to talk about the moral
bankruptcy of the death penalty. The culture at the moment is given to
supporting the growth of a prison industry to accommodate record numbers of
prisoners subjected to increasingly severe sentences; Attorney General John
Ashcroft, weighing in on the D.C. area sniper case, put at the top of the list
prosecution in a jurisdiction that would provide easiest access to the death
penalty; Ashcroft has further overseen the incarceration of U.S. citizens and
others in secret, without access to representation or contact with anyone in
the outside world.
No one wants to be perceived as being soft on crime. Ryan,
however, raises the more compelling question of whether we’re being soft
on justice and simple fairness.
His fellow governors would be well served to hear his reservations
and to take the time to carefully study their own state systems before allowing
more executions.
National Catholic Reporter, January 24,
2003
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