Four days into 2000, Ronald Jones, who had been convicted and then exonerated of murder, asked me to grant him a pardon. The criminal justice system—or what appeared to be a system of injustice for some people—continued to be a constant presence in my life. I wondered if this was going to be a common request.
I had just completed my first year as governor during which I engineered passage of a $12 billion construction program (Illinois First) and the higher taxes and fees necessary to pay for it. Tough on crime bills had been enacted and because of my efforts, 51 percent of all new revenue was being funneled to education. We passed tuition tax credits for parents with students in private and public schools and health maintenance organization reforms.
I had visited Cuba—the first state governor to do so since Castro came into power there in 1959. Our delegation received approval as a humanitarian mission and hauled along $2 million worth of pharmaceuticals and medical and educational supplies. I spent seven hours with Castro and called for an end to the US trade embargo with Cuba. After a Cuban representative came and addressed the legislature, we became the only state at the time to pass a bill to urge Congress to end the embargo.
Two weeks after Jones asked for a pardon, Cook County prosecutors dismissed murder and armed robbery charges against Steve Manning, who had been sentenced to death in 1993, largely on the testimony of a notorious jailhouse informant named Tommy Dye as well as testimony from the victim’s wife, who claimed that on the day her husband disappeared, he told her that if he didn’t come home to call the FBI and blame Manning, his business partner.
In 1998, the Illinois Supreme Court had vacated Manning’s conviction, ruling that the testimony from the victim’s wife never should have been admitted and that the introduction of evidence of other crimes by Manning was unfairly prejudicial.
The Chicago Tribune had highlighted Dye in its series on Illinois death penalty cases. The newspaper said Dye was “a con man and chronic liar who fabricated stories even under oath and that his testimony incriminating Manning was undercut by the FBI’s own investigative reports.”
Dye testified at Manning’s trial that the FBI had given him a body recorder to wear during conversations with Manning when both were in Cook County jail. Dye claimed that Manning had twice admitted he killed his business partner, but the alleged admissions were not on the tapes. The tapes had two gaps, which Dye said occurred at exactly the time when Manning made the admissions. That was either a mind-boggling coincidence or a huge and convenient lie.
The dismissal of the charges brought the total of death row inmates who had been exonerated since I voted “green” in 1977 to thirteen!
Twelve had been executed.
Then, on Thursday, January 27, 2000, the Illinois Supreme Court tossed out the conviction and death sentence of Murray Blue for killing a Chicago police officer with a bullet to the head and wounding another officer. The court ruled that even though the evidence of guilt was “overwhelming,” the prosecutor in the case, James McKay, had egregiously overstepped his boundaries and made a naked appeal to the jury’s emotions. He had wheeled in a headless mannequin clothed in the dead officer’s uniform that was stained with blood and brain matter.
The ruling pushed the number of Illinois capital cases reversed for a new trial or sentencing hearing to 131, slightly more than half of the 261 death-penalty cases that had completed at least one round of appeals.
I wondered if this would ever stop.
My good friend and advisor, Pete Peters, had begun quietly advocating for a moratorium after the Chicago Tribune published the series exposing the deep fissures in the Illinois death penalty system. Meanwhile, the antideath penalty groups were issuing calls for moratoriums of varying lengths as well as for outright abolishment.
And Dennis Culloton, who was my media spokesman, also was working behind the scenes. Dennis had checked with our legal office to try to find out if a governor even had the power to declare a moratorium. No governor had done such a thing in the United States. Was it even possible?
It was.
In fact, the Illinois constitution gave me broad power to act in the interest of justice. Dennis had presented me with a one-page summary of the Tribune reporting, which concluded with the fact that I did have the power to declare a moratorium. I started reading the bullet points—thirteen inmates exonerated, inmates convicted solely by jailhouse snitches, lawyers who were disbarred or disciplined representing defendants, black defendants convicted by all-white juries—and after each one, I asked rhetorically, “How does that happen?”
That question, which sprang from me organically as a reaction to these stunning revelations, became the foundation of my speeches and public statements over the next three years. It sprang from my honest, immediate impression of the mess that was the criminal justice system. And really, it was a mess.
While we were sitting in my private office, my secretary came back and said that Attorney General Jim Ryan was on the phone.
“Cuz,” I said, a name I used because we had the same last name, although we were not related.
Ryan got straight to the point. “There are more than ten death row inmates whose cases are in the pipeline,” he said.
“Uh-huh, is that right?” I replied.
“Yes,” he said. “They are either out of appeals or about to exhaust their last appeal.”
Ryan paused.
“It’s time to start setting some execution dates,” he said.
“You might want to hold off on that,” I told him. “I think I am going to have something to say.”
And that is how it happened. I instructed my staff that we had to meet on an important and urgent matter—I wanted to declare a moratorium.
Dennis wanted me to approve giving advance notice to the Chicago Tribune so the paper could have an exclusive story in its Sunday edition about the forthcoming announcement. So, that Saturday afternoon, I gave Dennis the nod to contact the Tribune and to plan for the Monday news conference at 10:00 a.m. As we were talking, I began chuckling.
“What’s so funny?” Dennis asked.
“Pate’s gonna love this,” I laughed.
And so did Dennis.
Pate, of course, was Pate Philip, the architect of the defeat of the Safe Neighborhoods Act just a month earlier. Philip was deeply conservative and came from DuPage County, where death row exonerees Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez had been wrongly convicted.
On Monday at 10:00 a.m., I walked into the fifteenth floor conference room at the State of Illinois Building in Chicago. The room was packed with reporters. They knew what was coming. They just didn’t know what the words were yet.
“I now favor a moratorium,” I began. “Because I have grave concerns about our state’s shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row. How do you prevent another Anthony Porter—another innocent man or woman from paying the ultimate penalty for a crime he or she did not commit? Today, I cannot answer those questions.”
“I have grave concerns about our state’s shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row,” I continued. “It is a system so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare.”
I said that while I still considered the death penalty a proper societal response to crimes that shock sensibility, I believed that Illinois residents were troubled by the persistent problems in the death penalty system. I called for a review of the system and said I would appoint a commission to undertake a full examination. “It’s not going to be a stacked panel one way or the other.
“Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate.”
I pointed to the Tribune investigation. “Disbarred lawyers, jailhouse informants—those kinds of problems are in the system, and we’ve got to get them out,” I said.
“There’s going to be a lot of folks who are firm believers in the death penalty who may not agree with what I’m doing here today,” I said. “But I am the fellow who has to make the ultimate decision whether someone is injected with a poison that’s going to take their life.”
I took note of the various task forces already studying the issue, saying, “As governor, I am ultimately responsible, and although I respect all that these leaders have done and I will consider all that they say, I believe that a public dialogue must begin on the question of the fairness of the application of the death penalty in Illinois.”
And with that, Illinois marched into the history books. What I didn’t realize was how much more history there was to write.