I knew the decision to impose a moratorium was significant, but the reaction caught me completely off guard.
In Rome, Italy, the lights at the ancient Colosseum shone golden in honor of my decision. This was the place where gladiators once fought to the death and it had become, to my surprise, a focal point of the antideath penalty movement. I learned that beginning in 1999, the Colosseum lights, which were usually white, were gold for a two-day period each time someone was spared execution or a country abolished the death penalty. Now, the lights were burning gold for the eighth time already this year. There were scores of demands to be interviewed by media in the United States and around the world, particularly in Europe, which had long ago banned the death penalty and considered us barbarians for continuing to exercise it.
My decision meant that Illinois was the first of the thirty-eight states with the death penalty to formally suspend executions. At least six states had considered the idea in 1999, but none had actually done it. Nebraska came the closest—a bill calling for a two-year moratorium was passed by the legislature, but Governor Mike Johanns vetoed it in May 1999, saying it was “poor public policy” and would only inflict more pain on the families of the victims. He said that a moratorium would “at a minimum be utilized to advance further unnecessary criminal appeals by those currently sentenced to death in Nebraska.”
The reaction to my decision was mixed and some of it was expected.
Kirk Dillard, an Illinois Republican senator, said, “The person who stands behind the final lethal injection and the prison is George Ryan. He’s the final stopper, and if he’s not comfortable with the process, then I would support his efforts to have experts make him comfortable with the process.
“My guess is virtually every member of the Senate Republican caucus supports the death penalty,” Dillard said. “And I don’t know how any of us could oppose the governor wanting to make sure that the death penalty system, the most important cornerstone of Illinois criminal law, is working.”
US senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and member of the US Senate Judiciary Committee who was preparing a package of death penalty reforms called my decision “courageous and timely.” He predicted it would be a “catalyst for a similar review in Washington.”
However, Illinois state senator Ed Petka, a Republican, said, “I believe in capital punishment and I think the quicker we get on with the business of getting rid of hard-core, cold-blooded killers who are truly guilty, the better.”
The prevailing thought on the prosecution side seemed to be if someone was convicted erroneously, that’s what the lengthy appeals process was for. The courts would catch the mistakes and right the wrongs in their own good time.
DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett, who in 1995 had prosecuted Rolando Cruz a third time for the murder of Jeanine Nicarico despite the evidence that Brian Dugan was responsible for the crime, said, “By setting aside all executions, Ryan is standing in the way of victims’ families seeing criminals put to death who have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by the legal process. They have a constitutional right to be treated with dignity and respect.” Birkett added, “There is no chance an actual innocent will be executed. It doesn’t exist.”
Ronald Tabak, a New York City attorney who headed up a death penalty committee at the American Bar Association (which had urged a national moratorium three years earlier), said, “When a conservative Republican governor in a large state with a large death row recognizes that there are so many systemic questions about the death penalty, it strongly buttresses the need for a moratorium in all the other states. As great a need as there is for a moratorium in Illinois, the need is even greater in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and many other states.”
Cook County Public Defender Rita Fry said, “I assume that he’s doing it for all the right reasons. I think he realizes that this is an embarrassment to Illinois and that the system, while not perfect, could certainly be better. I think he’s trying to do the right thing.”
Dan Curry, a spokesman for Attorney General Jim Ryan, whose phone call about setting execution dates had spurred me to act, said that Ryan supported the idea of a moratorium. “Everyone is working toward the same goal,” Curry said. “And if the governor believes the process should continue in an execution-free environment, the attorney general supports that.”
Chris Lauzen, a conservative Republican Illinois senator, said that though he supported the death penalty, “What else could we do? Nobody wants to put innocent people on death row.”
The moratorium received headlines everywhere; not because I wanted it to be or because I had mapped out a grand strategy to generate support for the issue, but because I came to realize there was a growing groundswell of uneasiness about the death penalty all across the country. But it had been a quiet unease because the supporters of the death penalty have always owned the debate. Being “tough on crime” and supporting the death penalty is always easier in the public debate because the opposing position is automatically “soft on crime,” and nobody wants to be soft on crime.
Bill Ryan, head of the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project, a coalition of antideath penalty groups and people, called the moratorium “a very courageous step. This says Illinois leadership is sensitive and has the courage to address its faults.”
Larry Marshall, the Northwestern University law professor whose conference on the death penalty and whose personal counsel had helped me immensely, called my decision “a wonderful, wonderful statement” of my moral ground. “Even if a person looks guilty, he now knows from our lessons in Illinois that looks can deceive.” Marshall added, however, “The real question is going to become: What happens? What does the commission look like and how seriously do they take their job?”
There certainly was no magic solution to the problems with the death penalty in Illinois, but I truly believed that a moratorium was a middle ground that was acceptable to abolitionists and more-or-less acceptable to law enforcement and victims’ families.
We needed time to separate fact from fiction and take a thoughtful look at where we were and where we wanted to be.
I was hoping a moratorium would get the approval of the public simply because of the math—more men had been exonerated from death row than had been executed. Every time the issue drew media attention, the moratorium idea had been raised again and again and again. It had happened in the days leading up to the execution of Andrew Kokoraleis. It happened when Ronald Jones was exonerated. It happened when Steve Manning was exonerated. It happened when anyone in the United States was exonerated.
Still, I was fully aware that a moratorium was not universally welcomed, especially among some elected officials and some families of victims. Aside from African American and Hispanic lawmakers in the House and Senate, few legislators were interested in supporting a moratorium, even when confronted by the facts.
Some state’s attorneys told the media the moratorium was unconstitutional and that I didn’t have the authority under the Illinois Constitution to issue a blanket moratorium on all executions.
I knew I didn’t have the authority to prevent the prosecutors from seeking the death penalty. I couldn’t stop the courts from sentencing someone to death. And I couldn’t stop the Illinois attorney general from scheduling an execution date.
But under the law, I still had to sign off on any and all executions. That was my power and mine alone. What I’d have to do was deal with each death case individually as it came to my desk. My position, simply, was that you send me one case with an execution date, I’ll hold on to that and I won’t sign the death warrant. You send me ten cases and I won’t sign any of the ten death warrants. That’s how it was from the get-go.
Even before I decided to impose a moratorium, I had decided I needed to hire an expert on criminal justice issues. So, I brought in Matthew Bettenhausen, a veteran of twelve years in the US Attorney’s Office, as my deputy governor for public safety to oversee criminal justice and law enforcement policy. I wanted him for his knowledge and experience, and his first task was to organize the commission to study the death penalty system in Illinois.
A poll that had been commissioned in 1999 by the Death Penalty Education Project found that 70 percent of Illinois citizens supported a moratorium on executions. What was more, that support was broad-based. Not only did Democrats and self-described liberals support a moratorium, but so did Republicans and a lot of conservatives too. But prior to making my decision to declare a moratorium, I never consulted the opinion polls. That wasn’t my concern. My concern was the system in Illinois. It was obviously riddled with error and the innocent were being convicted and condemned along with the guilty.
I knew we couldn’t abolish it. I didn’t have the votes and I couldn’t get any more in the General Assembly. But as long as I had the executive power to say that we were going to stop the death penalty for a time and as long as I was governor, I was determined that there would be no more executions until we found out what was wrong with it and got it fixed.
I likened it to flying an airplane from Chicago to Boston. If we flew the airplane from Chicago to Boston seven days a week and it crashed four days out of a week, would we continue to send planes every week? The best thing to do would be stop the flights, identify the problem, and fix it.
I wanted the commission to take a critical look at the death penalty law and see how it was used, who it was used against, and to suggest reforms and changes for what wasn’t working. The fourteen-member commission that Matt put together included prosecutors and defense attorneys. It also included the well-known—such as best-selling author Scott Turow, who was a former federal prosecutor and also had defended a death penalty case—and the virtually unknown—Roberto Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant who founded a commercial janitorial firm in a Chicago suburb.
Frank McGarr, former chief US district judge in Chicago, was the chair. The vice chairs were Paul Simon, who had served Illinois in the US Senate, and Thomas Sullivan, who had served as US attorney in Chicago and also was a veteran criminal defense attorney.
I decided at the outset to give them a lot of latitude, including the authority to recommend abolition. With Bettenhausen’s help, we purposely structured the commission to eliminate, as much as possible, any belief that the outcome of the panel’s work was a foregone conclusion that would just back up what I already had done.
On March 7, 2000, the Chicago Tribune reported that a poll it had commissioned showed that support for the death penalty in Illinois had dropped from 75 percent in 1994 to 63 percent in 1999 to 58 percent in 2000. The numbers on the death penalty versus life in prison without parole were even starker: 43 percent supported the death penalty and 41 percent supported life without parole.
Two days later, I held a press conference in Chicago to announce what we called the Death Penalty Moratorium Commission.
“The system has proved to be so fraught with error that thirteen innocent people almost faced the ultimate nightmare of being wrongly convicted of a crime for which they had been sentenced to die,” I said. “I can draw only one conclusion: our system is broken.”
I introduced or described the members of the commission, including former federal judge and FBI and CIA director William Webster. “His name is synonymous with integrity and public service,” I said.
I ticked off the names in addition to Simon, McGarr, Turow, Sullivan, and Ramirez. Cook County public defender Rita Fry, Lake County state’s attorney Michael Waller, chief of staff for the Chicago police (and former Cook County prosecutor) Thomas Needham, criminal defense attorney (and former Cook County prosecutor) William Martin, private attorney Donald Hubert, Illinois state appellate defender Theodore Gottfried, former federal and Cook County prosecutor Andrea Zopp, and Montgomery County state’s attorney Kathryn Dobrinic. Bettenhausen would also be part of the commission.
“This will be an extraordinary undertaking,” I declared. “Each of the commission members is aware of that. This is a complicated issue, but there is nothing more important. It is serious business.
“Not only were thirteen innocent men nearly executed, there are some other facts that I find remarkable brought to light in the recent Chicago Tribune reports: half of the nearly three hundred capital cases had been reversed for a new trial or sentencing hearing, thirty-three death row inmates were represented at trial by an attorney who had been disbarred or suspended at some point, thirty-five African American death row inmates had been convicted or condemned by all-white juries, and prosecutors used jailhouse informants to convict or condemn forty-six death row inmates.
“And these are just a few of the issues that have raised questions about the fairness of the administration of the death penalty in this state,” I said. “So, my only direction to this commission is to remind them of what I said on January 31: 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. We must ensure the public safety of our citizens, but in doing so we must ensure that the ends of justice are served. This concept is fundamental to the American system of justice.”
The panel had three main tasks:
Study and review the administration of the capital punishment process in Illinois to determine why that process had failed in the past, resulting in the imposition of death sentences upon innocent people.
Examine ways of providing safeguards and making improvements in the way law enforcement and the criminal justice system carry out their responsibilities in the death penalty process—from investigation through trial through judicial appeal and to executive review.
Make any recommendations and proposals designed to further ensure the application and administration of the death penalty in Illinois is just, fair, and accurate.
I stepped aside while Judge McGarr made a brief statement before taking questions from the media. “Our first task has to be to focus on the problem, fully understand it, gather all the evidence,” he said. “We don’t know what our timetable is, we haven’t had our first meeting. . . . We’ve got to find out why it’s flawed, in what way it is flawed . . . and how it can be corrected.”
The mix of prosecutors and defense attorneys, members of law enforcement, lawyers who had both been prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers, as well as people with extensive experience in politics and government was designed to prevent any objections of bias—one way or another. Along with Turow’s celebrity, Simon and Webster added considerable weight. I thought it was a well-rounded group of very bright, hardworking people with unassailable reputations for integrity.
Nonetheless, there was criticism.
I had anticipated some criticism from death penalty supporters who feared that the commission was only going to rubber-stamp the moratorium and automatically call for the end of the death penalty because they thought that’s what I wanted. That didn’t happen, though. I am sure that was blunted by the fact that nine of the fourteen members were prosecutors or former prosecutors.
Instead, some antideath penalty activists actually accused me of stacking the commission with death penalty supporters. That dumbfounded me. I was the one governor in the history of Illinois who was seriously listening to them about their concerns and had enough gumption to actually declare a moratorium because I thought the system was broken. I decided that these criticisms were just a “told you so” strategy in case a commission they couldn’t control didn’t agree whole-heartedly with what they were after. I could see that after years of getting nothing but lip service, these people really didn’t trust anyone in power and were still unsure whether I ultimately would bend to political pressure and end the moratorium. They were afraid that I would use the commission as a justification to return Illinois back to the old days.
In fact, I was serious about what I wanted this commission to accomplish. I didn’t think this could be overstudied or that too much information could be gathered. I also didn’t want them to automatically agree with me; I wanted the truth. I wanted a detailed look at the problem and concrete ways to fix it. If the system could be fixed, that was fine with me. I just didn’t want Illinois fumbling along with a process that got things wrong on a life-or-death decision more times than they got things right. If we continued down that road, I was convinced that, one day, the state would put an innocent man or woman to death. As long as I had some power to help make sure that didn’t happen, I was going to do my best to fix things.
Later that day, the Chicago Council of Lawyers issued a fifty-eight-page report suggesting several reforms aimed at preventing wrongful executions. It was a jump-start of sorts. The recommendations included videotaping of all interrogations, not just confessions, in murder cases.
I couldn’t help but wonder what a difference such a requirement would have made in the cases of Gary Gauger and Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez.