“I don’t know how I could pick and choose.”
With those words, said in response to a reporter’s question, I unintentionally raised the volume in what was turning into a war of words over the clemency process.
I said I was strongly considering a blanket commutation to life in prison without parole for all of the death row prisoners. I said I had to determine whether it was going to be “for everybody or for anybody.”
At that moment, I didn’t think that I could pick and choose among the scores of cases and say, “You’re going to die because the system was fair to you and you’re not going to die because the system was unfair to you.” How was I supposed to know who was guilty and who had been tried fairly? Whether it was bogus evidence or a jailhouse snitch or torture or DNA testing not being available—there were so many steps in every capital punishment case that had proven to be vulnerable to mistakes or misconduct by police or prosecutors.
I made the comments after being informed that Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine was claiming that the rights of the families of the victims were being trampled because of the fifteen-minute time limit for each inmate’s clemency hearing.
“If that’s the case,” I said, “maybe we ought to have a blanket commutation,” although I added that I had not yet made up my mind whether to do so. In a not-so-veiled comment directed to the legislature, I also said that my decision might be helped if the General Assembly would act on my recommended changes to the death penalty system.
Devine immediately fired back. “His suggestion to treat all of these cases in one blanket move and to say he can’t pick and choose among these is irresponsible and an insult to the hundreds of victims’ families who have lost a loved one due to violent crime,” he declared.
As the clemency process came under fire, the media, which largely had initially embraced the idea of a blanket commutation, started to back away. The Chicago Sun-Times was first, and then a number of other newspapers expressed skepticism about commuting every sentence to life. In my view, they were trying to have things both ways. They still supported the moratorium and they agreed that the system was broken, but in the same breath they said that the system probably wasn’t broken for this defendant or that defendant. One writer suggested that in order to make sure that public support for the reform of the death penalty remained strong, I should make sure some executions took place in the future. That, to me, was the height of idiocy.
There was an onslaught of public criticism from victims’ families. I understood that what I was saying was probably hurtful. But I could not erase their pain and I had come to believe that even execution does not provide true closure.
The media was shifting away from the flaws in the system to the crimes and victims and the families. They gave voice to people who portrayed me as a heartless man who wanted to rob people of justice. For these people, there was no justice without death. The theme of story after story was that stopping an execution was the equivalent of letting someone out of prison or reversing a guilty verdict. That was the furthest thing from my mind. Yes, there were people on death row who were guilty of the crimes they committed, but I believed that keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives did not mean they were escaping justice. But with a seemingly endless supply of victims’ families to interview and crimes to rehash, the message they all shared was crystal clear: no commutations.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell was scathing in her denunciation of a blanket commutation. “The governor’s ‘all or nothing’ attitude is not merciful,” she wrote. “It is callous. It is also dangerous. When people believe there is no justice for them and their family, they start taking the law into their own hands. Under Ryan’s proposal even a Hannibal Lecter would be spared.
“Like the survivors, the wrongfully convicted don’t want mercy. They want justice,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, blanket clemency affirms the notion that we’ve given up. Justice is too much to ask.”
Dawn Pueschel was very angry. Nineteen years earlier, in 1983, her brother, Dean, and her sister-in-law, Jo Ellen, had been beaten to death with baseball bats in their apartment on the North Side of Chicago. Their eleven-year-old son had been horribly beaten, but somehow managed to survive. Two brothers, Reginald and Jerry Mahaffey, were convicted and sentenced to death.
“We are the ones who have no rights as survivors,” she told the Sun-Times. “Our loved ones were not able to say which persons killed them. No. The death penalty is not going to bring our loved ones back, but it is a closure. People forget about the families that have to survive. None of us should have to go through this, but Governor Ryan is pushing this so he can go out with a big bang. How can he do it?
“I am still going to court after nineteen years,” she said. “There was never a single mistake made. I think it is a travesty of justice that they are going to commute these sentences and give these people life without parole. Well, life doesn’t mean life.”
Robert Weides, whose eighteen-year-old son Jeffrey, a bar manager who had been killed in a tavern shootout in April 2001, was still in pain. The gunman, Luther Casteel, had been sentenced to death for killing Jeffrey and a bar patron. “Taking the easy way out is no comfort to the thousands of victims of high crimes of deliberate murder,” Weides said. He noted that Casteel had not filed a petition for clemency and that there was no doubt about Casteel’s guilt. He said that my comment that trying to pick and choose would be like flipping a coin was preposterous. “It’s called intelligence,” Weides said. “Doesn’t he have any?”
In a letter to the editor at the Sun-Times, Julie Hyman of Grayslake, a suburb north of Chicago, wrote, “Governor Ryan is deciding whether to commute the death sentences of 157 inmates in Illinois. The man who killed my father nine years ago is one of them. Jonathan Preston Haynes systematically selected my father, Martin R. Sullivan, MD, DDS, from a phone book before he brutally shot him to death in his office. My father was executed because of one man’s belief.
“Now Governor Ryan believes the white supremacist murderer should be released from death row. . . . If Governor Ryan chooses to overturn all 157 death sentences, he will in this case grant leniency to a self-proclaimed Nazi who wishes to eradicate all but the white race.”
As the petitions were filed, the names of some of those seeking relief from death sentences became public.
It was a litany of evil.
One of the more horrific was the case of Fedell Caffey and Jacqueline Williams, who were convicted of murdering twenty-eight-year-old Debra Evans, who was pregnant, and her two children, ages seven and ten, and then slicing Evans’s unborn child from the womb. The disclosure that Williams and Caffey were seeking clemency triggered emotional letters to the editor.
“Governor Ryan, get the electric chair ready,” wrote Stella Rocco. “Debra Evans was a friend of mine. It made me sick. It would be a shame if Jacqueline Williams would get away with this murder.”
Ruth McDonald, Evans’s aunt, wrote from Genoa City, Wisconsin, “Williams and Caffey should not spend the rest of their lives in jail,” she said. “We are all victims of this crime if they are allowed to live. If any crime deserves the death penalty, this one does.”
Gladys Young, whose husband, Chicago police officer Gregory Young, was murdered in 1997 during a robbery, reported that she attended a meeting convened for victims’ families in Cook County. “We sat in a room and learned that our rights as family members of victims are about to be trampled upon by the governor of Illinois. We were told the governor, through his Prisoner Review Board, is going to limit our ability to speak out against petitions for clemency by the inmates who killed our relatives. This is wrong.
“I fear the governor is going to disregard the pain and suffering that the man who killed my husband inflicted upon my family,” she said. “Blanket clemency . . . is an insult to me and every person whom these inmates affected.”
Other inmates seeking clemency included Edward Spreitzer, a member of the “Ripper Crew,” and a codefendant of Andrew Kokoraleis, whose execution I had allowed to go forward back in 1999.
Henry Brisbon was on the list as well. In 1973, he and three other men stopped a car on Interstate 57. The couple in the car, James Schmidt and Dorothy Cerney, were dragged out onto the shoulder of the road, forced to lie down, and then Brisbon shotgunned them to death. For that, Brisbon received a sentence of one thousand to three thousand years—the death penalty was not on the books at the time of the crime. But five years later, in 1978, Brisbon shanked an inmate to death at the Statesville Correctional Center and that got him a death sentence and a ticket to death row. Once quoted as saying that he would keep killing people no matter how many times he was convicted, Henry Brisbon was now seeking clemency.
The swell of outrage from the victims’ families was still growing when, on Monday, September 16, Illinois attorney general Jim Ryan filed lawsuits, one in Sangamon County, where Springfield was located, and the other in the Illinois Supreme Court. The lawsuit in Sangamon County was an attempt to stop the clemency hearings, specifically claiming the fifteen-minute time limit was unfair to victims’ families. The lawsuit in the Supreme Court sought to block clemency hearings for two dozen inmates who had not signed clemency petitions and nine other inmates whose death sentences previously had been put aside by the Illinois Supreme Court and were awaiting new sentencing hearings.
Ryan, who was running to take my place as governor, called a news conference.
“While we are trying to improve the accuracy and fairness of the system, we also have another job to do and that is to respect the dignity and the rights of crime victims,” he declared.
Ken Tupy, legal counsel to the Prisoner Review Board, said the fifteen-minute limitation was only advisory—a guideline for the panel to follow. “There’s no other way to hear so many petitions in a timely fashion,” Tupy declared. “But it’s not like the panel would cut off a victim in the middle of a statement.”
He said the guideline had always been twenty minutes and was only shortened to fifteen to accommodate the scores of petitions received. He noted that the attorney general had never before objected to the guideline.
I saw the lawsuits as a bald-faced ploy for publicity by Ryan, who was trailing in the polls by a significant margin to Democratic candidate Rod Blagojevich.
My staff issued a statement saying that I welcomed the attorney general’s “new-found concern for fairness and justice” and that I believed that my “entire review of the capital punishment system now and in the future is constitutional and, more importantly, the only right, moral, and just thing to do.”
Northwestern’s Larry Marshall was even more blunt, calling the lawsuits a “very cynical political ploy.”
“It’s not about that Mr. Ryan is attorney general,” Marshall said. “It’s about that Mr. Ryan wants to be governor.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors filed responses to the clemency petitions—all ninety cases in Cook County and dozens filed by the attorney general on in cases in downstate counties. Most of them focused on legal issues and contended that the defendants had not received fair trials and that the flaws that had been identified in the thirteen exonerations were not present in these cases. Moreover, courts had ruled and upheld the convictions and sentences and claims by the defense of defective trials had been rejected.
The filings included written statements from victims’ families, including exhortations to carry out the executions. Some included gruesome crime scene photos of murder victims. The appeal was raw and emotional. Filings from the attorney general’s office contained the upside-down world claim that the thirteen exonerations were proof that the system actually worked correctly.
“These releases do not demonstrate a broken system, but rather a system that contains vigorous appellate and collateral avenues of relief,” the filings said.
That flew in the face of the facts as I knew them and was patently ridiculous. I believed that the thirteen exonerees were alive only because serendipitous miracles had occurred that prevented the state from doing what it wanted to do—kill them.
The evidence had shown me that these exonerations came from such acts as DNA testing, witness recantations, and confessions from the real killers. In the case of Gary Gauger, his full exoneration was the result of a federal wiretap during an investigation of a motorcycle gang—an act that could not have been more removed from and unconnected to Gauger’s case.
On October 10, Sangamon County circuit judge Donald Cadagin dismissed Attorney General Ryan’s lawsuit. Ryan claimed a victory, saying that the Prisoner Review Board had agreed it would not set time limits for comments.
It was a hollow victory, I thought. The Prisoner Review Board had said from the outset that the fifteen-minute limit was strictly a guideline and that no one would be cut off. And in fact, Judge Cadagin ruled that Ryan had no standing to bring the case.
The following day, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Ryan’s other lawsuit.
The rulings cleared the way for the clemency hearings to begin the following week. No one really had any idea what this would look like. If the files and the news accounts from victim’s families were any indication, it was going to be painful.