Earlier in the year, when Matt Bettenhausen rolled a cart into my office in Chicago that contained a binder for every defendant on death row, I really did believe that I could separate the innocent from the guilty—the shaky cases from the rock solid. Now, with the hearings over, I had a little more than two months before the end of my term as governor to make up my mind on what I was going to do. I was still waiting for all the reports from the Prisoner Review Board and their recommendations, which were confidential. I started a series of review meetings with Bettenhausen and other members of the staff to look at all the cases, one by one.
To avoid any suggestion of trying to influence the review board, I had purposely stayed away from the Prisoner Review Board hearings. But as I began to review the cases, I began wondering if it would be prudent or worthwhile to hear personally from the families of victims. And so, I decided it was important for me to hear directly what they told the board and see the emotion on their faces.
“I think hearing from them in person will be, without question, part of my deliberative process,” I said, announcing my intention during an address to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Chicago. “No one wants to see the families of the victims go through any more pain.”
The details were yet to be worked out. “I’m not sure just yet how we’re going to work this out,” I said. “If they want to bring all the victims into a room and hear me talk, I’ll be glad to do it. I can’t sit down with each one individually, there’s no question about that.”
The truth was that my staff had closely monitored the clemency hearings. Their reports, combined with the media accounts, presented a pretty clear picture. I was willing to meet with the victims’ family members, but I wasn’t sure that I could get much more from them than I already knew.
Still, I said, “I’ll meet anybody—the prosecutors, the defense lawyers—anybody that will meet with me. Over the last three years, since I started this moratorium, I’ve spoken to just about everyone who’s invited me to discuss our experience in Illinois.”
Asked about blanket commutation, I said, “It probably is still an option, but one that I probably won’t exercise after the hearings.”
As my staff was beginning to work on a plan to make the meetings with victims’ families happen, I received an open letter signed by more than 650 Illinois lawyers asking me to issue a blanket commutation. The signers included former prosecutors, defense lawyers, professors, and attorneys from some of the largest and most powerful law firms in Illinois.
Running nearly six pages, the letter said that a blanket commutation was the only sure way to avoid executing an innocent person. “A system, like the Illinois death penalty system, that cannot reliably distinguish the guilty from the innocent, surely cannot be entrusted to fairly and justly make the profoundly difficult decision whether a particular defendant is deserving of the ultimate punishment,” the letter said.
The letter was organized by the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions and the University of Chicago’s MacArthur Justice Center. It was an attempt to convince me that the idea of a blanket commutation was not a radical position, but in fact was embraced by many leading members of the criminal justice community.
Then, in the legislature, the House voted 84 to 30 to defeat my proposed reforms that I had tacked onto the death penalty for terrorism bill that the General Assembly had passed and that I had vetoed. It looked more and more like I was heading for a showdown over my proposals to fix the death penalty system.
On November 15, I was the featured speaker at the Northwestern University School of Law. My staff had arranged for Paula Gray to be present but didn’t tell her that the reason was that I was going to announce that I had issued her a pardon based on innocence. Paula Gray was a tragic figure in the prosecution of the Ford Heights Four—Dennis Williams, Willie Rainge, Kenneth Adams, and Verneal Jimerson—for the 1978 murder of Lawrence Lionberg and the rape and murder of Carol Schmal. Just seventeen and mentally disabled, Gray had first claimed to police that she held up a cigarette lighter as the crimes were committed. But prior to trial, Gray recanted her testimony and then was charged with murder, rape, and perjury. She was convicted and sentenced to fifty years in prison. She had been released on parole after eight years.
Meanwhile, Williams, Rainge, Adams, and Jimerson were exonerated after an investigation by Northwestern University journalism students and DNA testing excluded them from the crime. They had been pardoned, but nothing had been done on Gray’s behalf and I felt that she had been put through hell for more than two decades. It was time to do something.
As I addressed the audience, I said, “One of the few perks of this job is that occasionally you can bring some good news to people. This morning, I pardoned Paula Gray.” The crowd exploded in applause and everyone rose to their feet seemingly as one. As Gray put her hand to her forehead as if steadying herself, Dennis Williams walked over and embraced her.
Gray’s perjury conviction had been vacated a year earlier by Cook County Circuit Court judge William O’Neal, who said Gray had been initially forced to tell a version of the crime that the police believed had occurred. “The coercion of Ms. Gray to tell their concocted, inculpatory story and subsequent suppression of reliable evidence pointing to the guilt of others was both abhorrent and illegal,” Judge O’Neal declared. Despite the ruling, and although her codefendants had been exonerated, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office was seeking to appeal Judge O’Neal’s ruling.
“I don’t understand it,” I said. “I don’t understand how anyone can be opposed to righting the wrong the system committed against Paula Gray.”
I quoted from Judge O’Neal’s ruling in announcing the pardon. “Wrong is wrong, be it illegal actions of the street thug or the conduct—as in this [Gray’s] matter—by officers of the law and court.”
As I left Northwestern, I was handed a letter from noted American playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote The Crucible, a play based on the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Miller referenced a case in Connecticut involving a seventeen-year-old boy, Peter Reilly, who falsely confessed to murdering his mother.
“Having had some experience with a false confession by a seventeen-year-old boy, Peter Reilly, accused of murdering his mother, and later judged innocent, I appeal to you [to] do whatever you can to prevent the state from killing any of its citizens,” Miller wrote. “As you no doubt know, since the emotions raised by the accusations of murder are so intense, the likelihood of error in sentencing is high. Such was the case with Peter Reilly and I presume with others as well.”
On the Friday before Thanksgiving 2002, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board delivered their recommendations for the nearly 160 death row prisoners. I immediately began to review them over the weekend.
Meanwhile, we decided to schedule two meetings for the victims’ families—one in Springfield at the mansion and one in Chicago.
Whatever my decision was going to be—blanket commutation or decisions on a case-by-case basis—I didn’t want anyone to complain that they never had an opportunity to meet with me face to face and make their case and tell me how they felt. I strongly believed their thoughts and beliefs were very much a part of the decision process.
I felt the meetings would also give me an opportunity to explain why I declared the moratorium and established the Capital Punishment Commission—in essence, why I had concluded that the system needed to be reformed. We decided to keep these meetings private because we believed that people needed to express themselves without the spotlight of the media.
I met first with the victims’ families. This was very difficult for everyone. I knew going in that I wasn’t going to win any of them over when I explained to them what my thinking was. They carried pictures of their relatives with them to show me what had been taken from them. There were a lot of tears; a lot of anger. I saw it in their faces and I heard it in their words. They heard me out and allowed me to say that I really did feel the pain that they felt and understand their losses.
I also tried to explain to them that I didn’t think that the anger and sorrow over the loss of their loved ones would go away if the murderer were executed. I was very honest with them. I told them I didn’t believe that an eye for an eye was going to make them less angry or make everything better. I said that executions wouldn’t bring their relatives back and that I seriously doubted that executions would help them forget.
They talked about closure and how executions would provide that. I found myself wondering whether that really was the purpose of capital punishment. Was it to soothe the families of the victims? And I also had to ask myself whether it actually did that. I cannot imagine losing a family member to murder. Nor can I imagine spending every waking day for twenty years with a single-minded focus to watch a killer die.
Although the meetings were private, some of the family members talked to the media afterward. The media seized on comments by some that I said a blanket commutation was off the table. I did say that a blanket commutation was not a likely occurrence. And I was speaking the truth at that moment.
It was not easy to listen for several hours and hear the exhortations of people to kill other people so they could get closure and, yes, revenge for the loss of their loved ones. It was hard to remain stoic and not be moved.