New DPIC Podcast: Former Illinois Governor George Ryan on Commuting Death Row and His Journey from Death-Penalty Supporter to Abolitionist

In the October 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, for­mer Illinois Governor George Ryan speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the events that per­suad­ed him to com­mute the death sen­tences of all 167 death-row pris­on­ers in Illinois in 2003. Ryan and Dunham delve into the Governor’s jour­ney from death-penal­ty sup­port­er as an Illinois state leg­is­la­tor to death-penal­ty oppo­nent as Illinois gov­er­nor, and dis­cuss his new book, co-authored with Pulitzer-prize win­ning jour­nal­ist Maurice Possley, Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois.

The sto­ry begins, Ryan said, with the Supreme Court’s 1972 deci­sion in Furman v. Georgia to over­turn exist­ing death-penal­ty statutes and Illinois’ rein­tro­duc­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1977 after the Court upheld new death-penal­ty laws in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. This was a time when ​“law and order” and ​“get tough on crime” were pow­er­ful polit­i­cal themes, he said. Not only was sup­port for increas­ing­ly puni­tive crim­i­nal jus­tice poli­cies ​“the trend,” Ryan recalls, it won peo­ple seats in office. ​“I remem­ber the debate vig­or­ous­ly,” he told Dunham. Then a mem­ber of the Illinois leg­is­la­ture, Ryan vot­ed ​“green” for rein­tro­duc­tion of the death penal­ty in the state. Although he admits that he did not have a firm under­stand­ing of the issue at the time of his leg­isla­tive vote, ​“I had been a believ­er in the death penal­ty,” he said, ​“and thought it was necessary.” 

But dur­ing the leg­isla­tive debate, one oppo­nent of bring­ing back cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment asked: ​“For those of you that are vot­ing green today, how many of you would throw the switch to exe­cute some­body?” That argu­ment, Ryan said, ​“gave me a lit­tle pause for thought. I thought the law is need­ed. I thought it’s nec­es­sary. But I would nev­er want to throw the switch. Little did I know that some 20 years lat­er, that I’d be charged with that oblig­a­tion when the time came.”

Early in Governor Ryan’s term, on March 11, 1999, Anthony Porter, an intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled death-row pris­on­er, was exon­er­at­ed after hav­ing come with­in days of exe­cu­tion. Porter’s exon­er­a­tion was piv­otal in trans­form­ing Ryan’s view of the death penal­ty. ​“He was exon­er­at­ed by jour­nal­ism stu­dents at Northwestern University,” Ryan said, ​“so there wasn’t any­thing that the sys­tem could say, ​‘Oh, the sys­tem real­ly works.’ Because the sys­tem didn’t. And if it hadn’t been for the jour­nal­ism stu­dents at Northwestern, Anthony Porter would be in a box right now.”

When the gov­er­nor saw news reports of Porter’s release from prison, ​“I said to my wife, how does that hap­pen in America? How do you … put some­body in jail for 16 years of their life and each morn­ing, when they wake up, they have to won­der, ​‘Today, am I going to get exe­cut­ed or not?’… And that’s when I start­ed to look into things,” Ryan said.

Shortly after­wards, Ryan declared a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions and estab­lished a spe­cial Governor’s Commission to study the death penal­ty sys­tem as admin­is­tered in Illinois. Many sus­pect­ed Ryan intend­ed to pack the com­mis­sion with death-penal­ty sup­port­ers to jus­ti­fy con­tin­u­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Instead, he con­sult­ed with a range of advi­sors ​“to pick the right peo­ple, … top notch peo­ple — pros­e­cu­tors, defense lawyers, peo­ple that were involved with” the death penalty. 

The com­mis­sion met for more than a year, mak­ing 85 rec­om­men­da­tions for reform to, Ryan said, ​“lessen the chance that an inno­cent per­son was going to be exe­cut­ed.” In an elec­tion year, the leg­is­la­ture passed only one of the rec­om­men­da­tions, the video­tap­ing of con­fes­sions. ​“We just could­n’t get any­thing done from the General Assembly,” he said. Ryan then began review­ing the cas­es of every­one on the state’s death row, tak­ing the files with him ​“every­where I went — when I would ride in the car, on an air­plane, in my office, going to bed.” 

“At that time, we had exon­er­at­ed 13 through the courts that had been sat on death penal­ty for sev­er­al years, and we had exe­cut­ed 12. So it’s kind of like flip­ping a coin, to live or die, with the death penal­ty,” Ryan said. After read­ing the case files, ​“I decid­ed that I could­n’t deter­mine who would live and who would die,” he said.

So, two days before leav­ing office in January, cit­ing a death penal­ty sys­tem that was ​“fraught with error,” Ryan com­mut­ed the sen­tences of all 167 Illinois death-row pris­on­ers who had com­plet­ed the direct review process to life with­out parole, tem­porar­i­ly clear­ing the state’s death row. His staff almost uni­ver­sal­ly opposed the idea, say­ing it would be polit­i­cal­ly dam­ag­ing. ​“But, you know,” Ryan said, ​“I wasn’t going to a run again for office, so I wasn’t con­cerned about any of those things.”

Ryan sus­pects that his deci­sion had per­son­al ram­i­fi­ca­tions. ​“George Bush was the pres­i­dent at that time, and he was very upset with me, because I did what I did with the com­mu­ta­tion, and he let me know about it in no uncer­tain terms.” Ryan was sub­se­quent­ly fed­er­al­ly pros­e­cut­ed and con­vict­ed and spent five years in jail for pub­lic cor­rup­tion for actions that, he says, are no longer illegal.

Twenty years after Ryan’s mora­to­ri­um, ques­tions remain as to what can to be done to fix the death penal­ty and the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem. ​“The death penal­ty was an issue that the pub­lic gen­er­al­ly didn’t care about,” Ryan said. ​“And if they didn’t care about it, the leg­is­la­tors and the gov­er­nor cer­tain­ly didn’t.” He sees the fight to seek the abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty in America as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make the world a bet­ter place. ​“When you’re talk­ing about the death penal­ty, if you can’t get it straight and get it right, then you bet­ter not have it,” he says. ​“I would rather err on the side of life than on the side of death.”