Manny’s Deli on Jefferson Street, just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway, is one of my favorite places to eat lunch in Chicago. There hasn’t been a politician, including presidents, who has ever come through the city who didn’t visit here and sample the corned beef sandwiches and the latkes. But beyond the food, one of the main reasons I always liked to eat there was because it’s an old-fashioned deli.
In Manny’s, no one puts on airs. When I went there, occasionally someone would yell, “Hi, Governor!” But for the most part, I could grab my tray and go through the cafeteria-style line like anyone else. I would pay for my food at the end of the line and then wade into the dining room and find the first open table and chairs. Nobody reserved a table for me; and the people sitting next to you—from all walks of life—would almost always just barely look up from their sandwiches. If they recognized you, you’d get a nod or a small comment, but they always went right back to their plates. Although I’ve eaten in some of the best restaurants in the world, Manny’s will always be special.
There’s one more reason Manny’s is memorable. As the debate about whether I would empty death row continued around me, I decided to have lunch at Manny’s. As I munched on my corned beef sandwich, my cell phone rang. My staff back at the office wanted to connect me to a caller—Nelson Mandela!
I tried to maintain my composure, but I was shocked. I was sitting in a delicatessen with all kinds of working stiffs in jeans and businesspeople in suits—and I’m on the phone with one of the best known, renowned, and respected men in the world.
And he called me.
I had met him in Johannesburg during my trip there to develop business opportunities for Illinois. But our meeting had been brief because he was in ill health. At the time, he praised me for having the courage to declare a moratorium on the death penalty. I appreciated that coming from him. He had spent a majority of his life in prison—unjustly—and he never preached revenge or violence. He was a man who truly defined “turn the other cheek.”
His voice came through strong and clear.
“I urge you to issue a blanket commutation for everyone on death row,” Mandela said. “Revenge of this kind—the death penalty—has never made the world a better place. Governor Ryan, the United States has always set the standard for the world as far as justice, except where the death penalty was concerned. You can set a new standard.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The conversation was over almost as quickly as it began. I was mightily impressed that he felt that it was important to reach out to me on this issue and share his thoughts.
As the time left in my term dwindled, Mandela’s call was not the only one I received and not the only one from South Africa. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, also called to tell me how important it was to take a bold step and grant a blanket commutation.
“Your decision is important because it will show that the United States is moving in the right direction to join the majority of the rest of the world,” he declared. “It is impossible for any man to decide who should live and who should die, regardless of the crime that they committed. That power, Governor Ryan, rests solely with God.”
Other world leaders, including those from Mexico, Poland, the Vatican, and the European Union, similarly urged me to commute all death sentences in Illinois.
Those calls, especially Mandela’s, had an impact. Mandela and Archbishop Tutu had devoted their lives to righting the wrongs they saw around them. Mandela changed the direction of his country without a civil war. Desmond Tutu won a Nobel Peace Prize. It was humbling that they would think enough about what I was doing and what I was going through to want to call me and give me their thoughts.
Just before Christmas, Larry Marshall asked me to dinner. I agreed, not only because of all the time and effort he had put into educating me and pushing for reform and for a blanket commutation, but because I genuinely liked him. I trusted him. I believed his heart and mind were in the right place. I just wasn’t sure I was going to do what he wanted me to.
We met at Riva’s Restaurant on Chicago’s Navy Pier, a place well-known among politicians and public officials. I figured Larry was going to use this opportunity to make his “final argument” to me on why I should issue a blanket commutation. And I was right.
He had a list of reasons why I should go ahead and commute everyone. I had heard them all before. But his last point was different. He recounted the story from the Old Testament’s Book of Esther.
From 486 to 465 BC, Ahasuerus was the king of Persia, Larry began. From all the women in his kingdom, he chose Esther, an orphan of Jewish descent, to be his queen. She was instructed by her cousin, Mordecai, to keep her Jewish heritage a secret.
Sometime later, Mordecai, whose Jewish origin was well-known, offended one of Ahasuerus’s high officials, who sought and obtained Ahasuerus’s permission to have all the Jews in Persia killed. Mordecai concluded that the only hope for his people was to beseech Esther to approach the king, reveal she was a Jew, and persuade him to rescind his decision.
Doing that held great peril for Esther because she would be exposing herself to the decree against the Jews and because the king was known to frequently execute those who approached him without having been summoned. It was understandable, then, that Esther expressed great trepidation in response to Mordecai’s pleas.
Mordecai then made one final appeal to Queen Esther. He told her that she was in a truly unique position to change history and save countless lives. And he challenged her to consider the following question: “Who knows whether it was for this very moment that you have come to power?”
“Queen Esther,” Larry continued, “rose to the occasion. She approached the king and persuaded him to do all in his power to save innocent lives. You, Governor, are standing in an Esther moment. You, and only you are in a position right now to spare the lives of those who do not deserve to be killed, and to thereby change history. And, I hope I am not being presumptuous when I ask, ‘Who knows whether it was for this very moment that you have come to power?’”
It was a story that was unfamiliar to me. But its power and relevance to the moment in which I found myself was undeniable.
On Monday, December 30, a letter was delivered to my office containing the signatures of 428 law professors from across the country—more than twenty pages of names and law schools—urging me to consider a blanket commutation.
“The clemency power traditionally has been used not only to correct injustices in individual cases, but also as a response to problems in the systemic application of the law,” the letter said. “It can promote healing after issues of great divisiveness have been resolved.”
The letter followed similar ones in November and December from 650 Illinois lawyers and twenty-one retired Illinois judges, including Richard J. Fitzgerald, the former chief judge of the Cook County Criminal Court.
This appeal was organized by Anthony G. Amsterdam, a professor at New York University, one of the most—if not the most—distinguished law professor in the United States. Among his many achievements was his argument in the US Supreme Court that resulted in the 1972 ruling that declared the death penalty unconstitutional.
The letter said it was proper for me, as governor, “to assess clemency petitions and to grant commutations and pardons when the circumstances so justify, even if that means a general grant of clemency to remedy systemic problems.”
Amsterdam told the media that the sheer number of law professors was a clear indication that a blanket commutation was appropriate. “To get 428 signatures on detailed legal analysis is incredible,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “You can’t get ten people in a law school to agree to the length of a metal yardstick.”
When the media asked about my reaction to the letter, my spokesman Dennis Culloton said that my position was unchanged. “We’ve been reviewing each case individually,” he said, repeating that blanket commutation was “on the back burner.”
On New Year’s Eve, Reverend Jesse Jackson visited with inmates on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center. When he emerged, he called for me to issue a blanket commutation. That plea was echoed a few days later by death row exonerees Anthony Porter, Gary Gauger, and Perry Cobb who also called for outright pardons for inmates who had claimed they were tortured by detectives working under Jon Burge, the disgraced Chicago police lieutenant who oversaw the torture of scores of defendants.
At about the same time, the news broke that Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois Law School in Champaign, Illinois, and a death penalty opponent, intended to nominate me for the Nobel Peace Prize. Boyle said he was moved to make the nomination after hearing me speak about my journey. “His speech clearly came from the depths of his soul,” Boyle said.
Boyle said that I deserved recognition for my “crusade against what is clearly a racist and class-based death penalty system here in Illinois.” It would be the first of six such nominations for the peace prize.
My last days in office were incredibly busy. Not only were we packing up our offices in Chicago and Springfield, but also Lura Lynn and I were packing up our belongings at the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield. We were going to return home to Kankakee with boxes of books, papers, artwork, and an assortment of awards that had been conferred on me during my term.
As the packing continued, so did the discussions on each and every death row case. Many times, we worked into the early morning hours, buried in the binders, categorizing facts, and assessing the allegations that made quite a few of the convictions suspicious. And within my staff, there was a growing voice advising me against a mass commutation. They believed in the guilt in some defendants—based on evidence that under the law at the time made them eligible for the death penalty.
But the more I looked at those cases, the more I realized that I couldn’t decide that one would live while another would die. Even though we were trying to classify each of the cases and find patterns in the errors that were prevalent in capital cases, I couldn’t really be sure that there weren’t errors in every case. There were just too many possibilities to consider.
And so, I began to lean more and more toward a blanket commutation—that it was the only way to make sure that an innocent person wasn’t put to death. And then, I decided that was the only way to go. I was also deeply concerned because the General Assembly had done virtually nothing on the recommendations of my commission. Nothing. The legislation had been sabotaged, undercut, blocked, and basically left shipwrecked.
I had hoped the legislature would act, but in fact it had not.
In the end, my decision was a matter of conscience. A big part of my discomfort with the death penalty went beyond the documented problems with the administration of the law. There was also a personal aspect to it. As a religious person, it offended me. I have always prayed every day—every morning. I still do. And I have to say that the personal pleas from the clergy who contacted me, not only at the end of my term but at the beginning of it when I was weighing the Kokoraleis decision, played a part in my decision.
There was a mantra in what I heard from ministers and pastors and priests: God gives us life through our parents and life and death is not for us to decide. God provides us with the means and the knowledge to protect life and to prolong it. But ending the life of another person is not part of that package.
I knew in my heart that this is what I believed.
As governor, I had been thrust into a position where I had to decide on life or death. And I realized I couldn’t do it. And I say that now, even though I did allow an execution to take place. I realized that it had been impossible for me to walk away from that decision, even after all of those years.
I was bothered by it then. And I always will be.
When I looked into my heart and my mind, I saw I did not have it in me to condemn another human being to death. And my conscience was only strengthened by the fact that the evidence building against the capital punishment system as a whole led any reasonable person to conclude that the system did not serve justice, but violated justice.
And so, now that I had reached my decision, what was left was deciding when to do it and where.
There definitely was a promise I intended to keep. I had promised all the victims’ family members that I would not surprise them. And so, letters were prepared to be delivered to the doors of each and every family member by a member of the Illinois State Police. The letters explained that my decision was a difficult one, but that I felt it was the only way to prevent the execution of an innocent person. I signed off by saying, “May God bless you.”
I had decided that if I were going to err, I was going to err on the side of life.
My term as governor was set to end at noon on Monday, January 13, 2003. At that time, I would be sitting on the stage behind the newly-elected governor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, when he took the oath of office and assumed the duties of governor.
I decided that during my last week in office I would bring the death penalty debate that had dominated my term to a close. I would give a series of speeches at law schools in Chicago and describe my thinking and announce my final decisions then. The debate over capital punishment in Illinois was still supercharged with emotion—on both sides—and I decided that I wanted to speak to audiences that were sympathetic to my decisions.
During our review of the cases, I had flagged the files of the eleven men who had been put on death row by Burge. Each of them had described being suffocated, shocked by a cattle prod, or by a hand-cranked generator that sent electricity to alligator clips that had been attached to their genitals and other parts of their body as they were being interrogated and being beaten until they did what the officers wanted them to do—sign confessions.
Some of these cases, I thought, demanded more of a response that just a commutation of the death penalty that had been imposed on them. I concluded that for four of these men anything less than a pardon for the crimes that put them on death row was an injustice.
So, on Friday, January 10, 2003, during a speech at the DePaul University School of Law, I announced the pardons of Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Leroy Orange, and Stanley Howard.
“Today, I shall be a friend to Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard, Aaron Patterson, and Leroy Orange,” I said. “Today, I am pardoning them of crimes for which they were wrongfully prosecuted and sentenced to die.”
Patterson, of course, had been on my mind for many months, after I learned the details of his case—that he had used a paper clip to scratch a desperate plea for help into a metal bench in an interrogation room: “Police threaten me with violence. . . . Slapped and suffocated me with plastic. . . . Signed false statement to murders.” Patterson had been threatened with a gun during his interrogation. He was convicted and sentenced to death for a double murder on Chicago’s South Side in 1986 based on his confession and false testimony from witnesses. There was no forensic or physical evidence connecting him to the crime.
Hobley was convicted and sentenced to death after Chicago police detectives working under Burge asserted that Hobley confessed to setting a fire that killed his wife, son, and five other people in 1987 on the South Side of Chicago. Hobley claimed that the officers tortured him and when he refused to give a confession, the detectives just concocted one.
Stanley Howard had been sentenced to death in 1987 for a 1984 murder during an armed robbery on the South Side of Chicago. He had been convicted largely on the basis of his confession that was extracted by Burge’s men who had beaten him.
Leroy Orange had been convicted and sentenced to death for four murders in 1984 on Chicago’s South Side. His half-brother, Leonard Kidd, also was arrested, and during an interrogation by Burge detectives, gave a confession that implicated Orange. Before Orange’s trial, Kidd recanted, said his statement was the result of police torture, and actually testified at Orange’s trial that he committed the murders alone and without Orange’s knowledge. Orange was convicted basically on his confession, which he said came after he had been beaten, suffocated, and given electric shocks by Burge’s detectives.
Their torture claims had been corroborated over and over again.
“The system has failed for all four men,” I said. “And it has failed the people of this state.”
I added, “In some way I can see how rogue cops, twenty years ago, could run wild. I can see how, in a different time, they perhaps were able to manipulate the system. What I can’t understand is why the courts can’t find a way to act in the interest of justice.”
My speech was televised and was marked by frequent standing ovations. The Chicago Tribune reported that just before I began speaking, a hush fell over the Pontiac Correctional Center where many of the death row inmates were housed. One inmate told the newspaper later that even the guards and staff were watching. And when I announced the pardons, the inmates erupted in cheers.
I thought that this kind of decision sent a message that I had kept my word to study each case individually and judge each one on its merits. And in fact, I had studied each case. And based on the merits in these four cases, I decided that pardons were not only justified, but were necessary.
Of course, Cook County state’s attorney Richard Devine, whose office prosecuted the majority of the death row inmates, was—as he had been—vocal in his opposition. He accused me of jumping into bed with the defense attorneys. “All of these cases would have been best left for consideration by the courts, which have the experience, the training, and the wisdom to decide innocence or guilt,” Devine declared. “By his actions today, the governor has breached faith with the memory of the dead victims, their families, and the people he was elected to serve.”
I have thick skin. I knew this sort of reaction was coming. And I understood it. The Richard Devines of the world have a constituency and a job to do. I just didn’t quite see it the same way prosecutors largely did.
For me, a question remained.
“What does it take?” I asked, regarding the failure of the legislature to enact reforms. “Now we can say the number of wrongfully convicted men is not thirteen, but seventeen. And I would ask, ‘Will that be enough?’”