There were some deep political considerations that made me nervous. I was the Illinois chairman of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Although my chairmanship was a figurehead role, the moratorium and my questions about the system ran headlong into W’s views.
He was a two-term governor, first elected in 1994 and reelected in 1998. By the time he left the governor’s office in Austin in December 2000, a total of 152 executions had been carried out in the State of Texas. At that time, it was the most executions under any governor in the history of the state—a state known to have the busiest death chamber. I now understood the process—the cases come to the governor as the last stop before the needle is inserted and the poison injected.
W, I learned, was criticized for failing to take clemency petitions seriously. After my experience with Kokoraleis, I couldn’t conceive of someone who would blow off these petitions.
In other words: W was very pro-death penalty. In 2000, that’s what conservative Republicans wanted and he played to the base. And, according to him, all those defendants were convicted and sentenced after fair trials. They were all guilty and no mistakes had been made. He had repeatedly rebuffed requests for a moratorium. The death penalty wasn’t the only thing we differed on—I had raised taxes and promoted gun control legislation while he cut taxes and signed into law legislation allowing some citizens to carry concealed weapons—but the death penalty was the most obvious difference.
In the days leading up to the March primary elections, W came to Illinois and during stops at fund-raisers and rallies in Springfield, St. Charles, and Wheaton, we talked about the death penalty. How could we not? He told me he was confident of the system he had in place in Texas and that it worked well.
I told him that I, too, once thought our system was fine, but that I also never spent a lot of time looking at it. I suggested that someday, someone, even students or journalists, might find a case that would make him think twice about what he was saying.
Bush didn’t back down and neither did I.
I was speaking for Illinois and he was speaking for Texas. In the end, that’s what it came down to, I suppose. I did think, though, that it wasn’t smart for him to tell the world every time the subject came up that there was no possibility that an innocent person would be put to death in Texas. In my experience, just as soon as you say something like that, you’re proven wrong.
Four years later, in 2004, the Chicago Tribune presented compelling evidence that Cameron Todd Willingham had been wrongly executed earlier that year for arson that killed his three children. The evidence strongly indicated the fire was an accident. And in 2006, the Tribune reported on the wrongful execution in 1979 of Carlos DeLuna for the robbery and stabbing murder of a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi, Texas. The newspaper identified the real killer who had subsequently died in prison for stabbing someone else.
There had always been a little edge to my relationship with Bush. I knew we were never going to be friends. And I wasn’t going to stand down on an important issue just for the sake of his presidential ambitions. My decision to impose a moratorium wasn’t a political consideration, it was an important decision on an issue that I felt brought dishonor to my state and made it a symbol of injustice. I didn’t want that.
But because Bush had national political ambitions, he looked at things differently. I’m sure he saw me as a pain in the neck. My decision to impose a moratorium was used by the media—which weren’t friendly to him anyway—to paint him as some sort of mad executioner because so many defendants had been put to death in Texas. You could almost predict what would happen: the media would say, “Why couldn’t he be as enlightened as Ryan?” Then they would couple that issue with my visit to Cuba—which wasn’t well received with Hispanics in South Florida, a key voting bloc—and you could see what I mean. Bush and his chief strategist Karl Rove never had any use for me because it seemed that every time they turned around, I was going in the opposite direction from where they wanted everybody to go.
I did worry that if he were elected president, when Illinois was eligible for federal funding, he would think of me and freeze the state out of money. That would be petty, of course, but that’s what happens in politics. I took some comfort at the time in the fact that Illinois Republican congressman Denny Hastert was still Speaker of the US House of Representatives. I hoped he could help soften any hard feelings, but I suspected that even Hastert probably would not be enough.
I’m sure it didn’t help things when, in June, just three months later, the Chicago Tribune published an article documenting the examination of 131 executions that had been carried out by that time under W.
The article, “Flawed Trials Lead to Death Chamber,” was blunt.
“Under George W. Bush, Texas has executed dozens of Death Row inmates whose cases were compromised by unreliable evidence, disbarred or suspended defense attorneys, meager defense efforts during sentencing and dubious psychiatric testimony,” it began.
“While campaigning for president, Bush has expressed confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the death penalty system in Texas, the nation’s busiest executioner. He has said he sees no reason for Texas to follow Illinois’ lead by declaring a moratorium on executions,” the article said. “But an investigation of all one-hundred-thirty-one executions during Bush’s tenure found that the problems plaguing Illinois are equally pronounced in Texas and that additional flaws undermine the state’s administration of society's ultimate punishment.”
George Bush had never been a friend of Illinois. I don’t know if that sealed it, but it was hard to not say I told you so. In fact, a few years later, Illinois lost a multibillion-dollar Superconducting Super Collider project, even though Illinois was the best site for it. The project would have fit perfectly with FermiLab National Accelerator Laboratory in the western suburbs of Chicago. But instead, it went to Texas.
At that moment, I was thinking about the future of the death penalty in Illinois. I had stopped executions and now the commission was beginning its comprehensive look into how the capital punishment system was administered. A moratorium did not alter the verdicts or sentences imposed on any prisoners. I felt it gave us a chance to get to the real truth behind some of the more questionable convictions that had placed men and women on death row and possibly to build a public case for major reforms of the system—possibly even the abolition of the death penalty.
Larry Marshall wasn’t afraid to weigh in. During a speech before the Sangamon County Bar Association, he said that my stand “wasn’t one that everybody expected, but [Ryan] realized that the good people of Illinois wanted it fixed.” He noted that he was “unabashedly” opposed to the death penalty, but considering that “generally speaking, the American people support the death penalty . . . let’s see if we can fix it, at least.”
He ticked off ten reforms, including barring anyone from being executed solely on the testimony of a single eyewitness or being executed solely on the basis of a police officer claiming the person confessed as had happened in Gary Gauger’s case. No one should be executed on the testimony of a jailhouse informant or on the testimony of an accomplice, he declared.