The last half of 2002 was like dealing with Andrew Kokoraleis all over again. The pressure was on me and me alone to decide when the death penalty would next be used or if it would be used at all. I was right where I’d been when I declared the moratorium. I’d hoped that with a moratorium, a deep look into the issue would uncover that moral certainty or that “aha” moment to bring some closure to the issue. Instead, the debate continued down the same track: death penalty opponents telling me that a broken system tainted all death sentences and death penalty supporters and victims’ families telling me that a few bad cases didn’t taint all cases—that it would be easy to pick and choose who had been treated unfairly. I was sent lists of people considered guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.
With the clemency hearings about to start, the media began airing reports from victims’ family members speaking about the horrors inflicted on their loved ones. Some dreaded going to testify because it was ripping open old wounds. Others were eager, it seemed, to make it clear that they wanted these condemned men and women to die on the gurney. A smaller group—much smaller—said they could live with commutations.
Ordinarily, the Prisoner Review Board’s review of a case could take weeks or months and typically was a review of case files. Then, the board would give me a confidential recommendation on what the prisoner’s future should be. It would then be up to me to make the final call. I could accept the board’s recommendation or reject it or set my own course.
Amid the clemency petitions were a small group of death row inmates that went a step further—they were looking for full pardons based on innocence. Potentially, I thought, some of these cases might be exonerated before the sentence was carried out. I told my deputy governor for criminal justice, Matt Bettenhausen, that I wanted a special level of scrutiny for these cases. Some of these cases particularly stood out. There was Aaron Patterson, who claimed to have been tortured by the Burge crew to falsely confess to a double murder. There was Madison Hobley, who had been sentenced to death for setting a fire that killed seven people in 1987, including his wife and infant son. Yet another was Leroy Orange who was convicted and sentenced to death for four murders in 1984. Although their lawyers had been filing appeals for years, they had yet to convince a judge that they were innocent.
In a media interview just prior to the commencement of the first hearings, Prisoner Review Board chairwoman Anne Taylor said, “I expect these cases are going to be challenging and interesting. And they’ll be difficult to sort through.”
She really didn’t know what an understatement that was.
The rhetoric was on the rise before the first hearing began.
“The entire process is a profane burden and an insult. It’s a terrible thing that is happening in the state of Illinois,” declared Madison County state’s attorney William Haine. “My time will be spent reminding the governor of his oath . . . to defend the Constitution of Illinois and of the United States.”
The hearings were going to be televised live by cable news, and news agencies from around the world were readying to report on the proceedings as they unfolded. On the eve of the hearings, Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine called for a halt to the hearings—to cancel them all.
My spokesman, Dennis Culloton, responded on my behalf. “The governor has deep sympathy for the surviving family members and friends of these heinous crimes. However, the system of capital punishment in Illinois is badly broken and deeply flawed and each of the petitioners was convicted under that broken and flawed system. Executing the wrong inmate, as we have nearly done in Illinois thirteen times, would only compound the tragedy. A careful review of the cases now is the only prudent, just, and fair thing to do.”
Handling this review was the fourteen-member Prisoner Review Board, consisting of former law enforcement officers, prison officials, and ex-state lawmakers. The board was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Each member was paid at least $70,000 a year. They were not viewed as bleeding heart liberals, not by any means. The board members were allowed to apply whatever standards they chose and vote for a reduction of a sentence for any reason—whether they suspected an inmate was wrongly convicted or simply because they felt sympathy. Or they could recommend that the sentences stand as imposed.
It is hard to describe the Prisoner Review Board hearings. But in their essence, they became a horribly painful reopening of wounds on both sides. The victim’s families came forward, one after another, to provide heart-wrenching, tearful accounts of their losses. The testimony of family members of the defendants was just as sad—they, too, had lost loved ones. But overarching it all, the prosecutors presented in graphic detail the horrific acts that were perpetrated upon the victims. Defense attorneys portrayed the hearings as a significant step in the decades-long battle over the death penalty.
One prosecutor called the hearings “a profound insult to the administration of justice.”
Some victims’ families said execution was the only path to peace and resolution. At the same time, family members of inmates wept as they asked that death sentences be commuted to life without parole. It was, one Review Board member commented, an airing of the "unwarranted carnage exacted in their lives.”
“I see the blood of my nephews on my hands every day, and it’s not getting better,” said Estella Jennings, who was the aunt of three victims of Sherrell Towns. She recalled how, in 1993, she cleaned blood from the floor of the trailer where the murders occurred.
Even Henry Brisbon had his defenders. His lawyer, Jean Maclean Snyder, said that there was no doubt he committed the double murder which resulted in the sentence of one thousand to three thousand years. “But he was not sentenced to death for that crime,” she said, adding that the murder of a prison inmate which got him the death penalty “can’t be used as a surrogate for that.”
One of the Prison Review Board members, Arvin Boddie, was quoted by the media as saying during a break that he was “offended by the manner” in which the hearings were being conducted. “We’re not taking the time that’s necessary. . . . It’s being done in a truncated manner and panels have little direction,” he said. “I’m convinced it’s not the best way to handle it for victims and not for inmates either.”
Another board member, Susan Carol Finley, expressed irritation when the attorney for Jeffrey Rissley, who was convicted in the 1991 kidnapping, rape, and murder of a six-year-old girl, said Rissley deserved clemency in part because of mental illness. At least eighteen of the clemency hearings contained claims of mental illness or diminished mental capacity.
“I have trouble with all of these claims, that they’re mentally ill,” Finley said. “They’re evil. That’s what I'm looking at.”
Separately, during a hearing on a different petition, Boddie declared, “This claim of mental retardation is a fraud or a sham, plain and simple.” He warned the lawyer for Anthony Brown, who was condemned to death for the 1994 killing of star college basketball player Reginald Wilson and his girlfriend Felicia Lewis: “You have to remember you are under oath, you’ve got victims and people from the state of Illinois present. I’m to the point of getting sick and tired of hearing they didn’t have the benefit of this or the benefit of that, or they were mentally retarded without any evidence to support it.”
The raw emotion was aired every night on television and every morning in the newspapers. “This is like going to six wakes a day for 2 1/2 weeks,” said board member Craig Findley.
The media began to turn on me and the process. A typical response came from the State Journal-Register in Springfield, which published an editorial with a headline calling the hearings a “cruel sham.”
“One thing is for sure,” the editorial said. “These rapid-fire clemency hearings are certainly not the best way to review such serious cases. They are also horribly cruel to the relatives of the victims, who attend these cursory hearings that are not long enough to achieve any real search for the truth, but plenty lengthy to dredge up nightmares of a horrific crime.
“This will give Ryan the legal authority to commute these sentences. But anyone listening to the prosecutors’ and survivors’ testimony ought to have trouble justifying a blanket commutation.”
Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who had written extensively about the wrongly convicted and who supported the moratorium, also weighed in. Noting that by the end of the first week of hearings, the Prisoner Review Board had gone through about two-thirds of the petitions, he wrote,
In the name of the decency he says motivates him on the issue of capital punishment, Governor George Ryan should call at least a temporary halt to the proceedings.
He should postpone the resumption of hearings Monday, summon to the Capitol all of the members of his increasingly snappish review board, and spend a few days meeting with them behind closed doors to find out: Are the hearings doing any good?
It all looks wise and deliberate on paper. But the process has proved excruciating for the families of the victims of the atrocious murders at the core of each case. They’re not only reliving their most horrible moments during their testimony and news interviews, but they’re also feeling additionally tortured by the looming uncertainty, they say, and by the sense that the burden is on them to display sufficient anguish to justify executions.
Zorn wondered whether this sample was good enough for me to get an idea whether I could pick and choose or whether I would just go ahead with a blanket commutation to stop the hemorrhaging.
“The hearings have been a public relations nightmare for foes of the death penalty, whose sound arguments and tales of justice gone awry have been drowned out by the steady roar of accounts of the sorts of murders—heinous, appalling, wanton—that give capital punishment its visceral appeal,” Zorn wrote.
I was becoming the focal point of the attacks. A good example was the testimony of Wheeling police sergeant Bill Stutzman, whose fellow officer, Kenneth Dawson, was murdered on duty in 1985.
“I really wish that Governor Ryan was sitting here before us, so he could see the hurt in these families, hear the words that they’re speaking,” said Stutzman. He criticized me for not attending the hearings. “He has no intention of listening to these families. He’s completely victimizing these families all over again.”
I was getting so many calls from the media for a response that my office issued a statement saying I had “great sympathy” for victims’ family members, and that I was watching some of the proceedings on closed-circuit television. We told the press I was not going to attend any hearings because I didn’t want to give the impression that I favored any particular inmate.
My spokesman said I had not made up my mind.
“He isn’t sure what to do. The only thing he knows is this: We had a system that is broken at a variety of levels. . . . We’re sorry that the family members have to go through this again. But the family members would feel worse if we discovered after the fact that the wrong person had been executed for that crime.”
In the midst of this, there was the appearance at the hearings of Abby Mann, Academy Award winner for his screenplay of Judgment at Nuremberg, a highly-acclaimed 1961 film about Nazi war criminals. He told the media he was finishing up a script for the Showtime network about the death penalty system in Illinois. His presence was a bit otherworldly.
“I’m about through with the script,” Mann told the media. “Our justice system, my God, needs to be looked at,” he said. “But to look at our justice system, it really is broken.”
I was portrayed largely as the person responsible for this spectacle. The train of thought was that if I hadn’t declared the moratorium and talked about the possibility of clemency for every death row inmate, then that team of lawyers wouldn’t have filed so many petitions with the Review Board and the marathon hearings wouldn’t have happened and the families wouldn’t have to relive the crimes. It was tragic, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Reporters became more accusatory in their questioning of me about the hearings, suggesting the hearings were my fault and could have been avoided. They questioned whether I had any sympathy for the victims’ families and asked me why I didn’t call the hearings off after it became obvious that each case would be described in gory detail and would tear open barely-healed psychological wounds. The media descriptions of the hearings were evocative, ranging from “theater of pain” to “grinding caravan of misery.”
It didn’t seem to matter that it wasn’t in my power to disrupt the workings of the Prisoner Review Board or tell them how to handle the clemency petitions. Instead of asking the prosecutors why they were using every explicit detail, the media kept asking me how I could allow the prosecutors to use every explicit detail.
But then, on Tuesday of the second week of hearings, in what the media called an “about-face” and the result of a “public relations meltdown,” I momentarily relented. During a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Springfield, asked once again about the question of a blanket commutation, I said, “At this point, I’ve pretty much ruled out blanket commutation based on the hearings and the information I’ve gathered so far.”
But I cautioned, “Now that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. But I’ve pretty much decided that’s probably not, as I said, an option I will exercise.” I acknowledged, as I had many times, there were guilty people on death row who were rightly convicted. But as I also had said many times, I was bothered by the possibility of executing an innocent person.
“There isn’t any question in my mind that there are guilty people that have been through these hearings that are asking for clemency,” I said. “And we have to be able to try and sort out those people from the people that we think who have had some fault in the system that hasn’t given them a fair trial or a fair hearing. That’s been the attempt to do this all along, so we don’t kill an innocent person.”
The media were running around, asking people what they thought. Republican US House Speaker Dennis Hastert said, “I wish he’d certainly abandon this policy. I told him that and recommended that to him. Obviously, he didn’t do it.”
He added, “The issue of having blanket clemency hearings for everybody who has been condemned in this state, I think, is just obscene.”
The hearings ended, mercifully, on Monday, October 28. Everyone was drained.
In the end, only one victim’s family member stood up and argued for the innocence of the person convicted of the crime. Terry Hoyt testified in favor of the clemency petition filed on behalf of Montell Johnson, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Hoyt’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Dorianne Warnsley in 1994.
Johnson and Carl Stokes were accused of her murder. She had been shot, beaten with a hammer, and left to die by the side of a road near downstate Decatur. Stokes pleaded guilty, agreed to testify for the prosecution, and said Johnson was the killer, while Johnson said Stokes was the murderer.
Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death. Stokes got a fifteen-year prison sentence. It was during Johnson’s trial, in which he defended himself without a lawyer, that Hoyt later said she began to believe Johnson’s account. And so, she joined Johnson’s mother to ask the Prisoner Review Board to spare Johnson’s life.
This was exactly the kind of case that bothered me. There was no DNA evidence—in fact, there was no physical evidence linking either Stokes or Johnson to the murder. There were no witnesses who saw the crime. It was basically Stokes’s word against Johnson’s.
The following day, family members of some of the victims brought petitions to my office in Chicago. The petitions had been signed by more than three hundred family members of victims, demanding that I not issue a blanket commutation and also to make public the recommendations by the Prisoner Review Board.
Asked for a response, I said, “I'm going to do what I think is right, as I have through this whole process. I’m not going to be intimidated by petitions or state’s attorneys or prosecutors or defenders or news people or anybody else. It isn’t going to happen; that’s my response and that’s all I have to say about it.”