On November 8, 1994, the same day I was reelected to a second term as Illinois secretary of state, a mud flap taillight assembly fell off a semi-trailer on an interstate highway near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The one hundred-pound piece of metal pierced the gas tank of a minivan containing the Reverend Duane Willis, his wife, Janet, and six of their nine children. The gas tank exploded, and all the children perished. Willis and his wife survived.
This enormous tragedy, a horrible accident, ultimately led to a federal investigation of workers in Illinois driver’s license facilities. The driver of the truck from which the taillight assembly fell off was identified as Ricardo Guzman, a Mexican immigrant. Although Guzman was never convicted of a crime, state workers at the driver’s license facility in McCook, Illinois, where he obtained his trucker’s license, were convicted of accepting bribes—including from Guzman—to approve licenses for nonqualified applicants—such as Guzman.
The federal investigation, which was called Operation Safe Road, eventually resulted in charges against seventy-nine people, including me.
In December 2003, about eleven months after I left the governor’s office, a federal grand jury indicted me on charges of racketeering, mail fraud, and making false statements. The investigation of driver’s license facilities was expanded to other aspects of the secretary of state’s office. I was accused of receiving cash and gifts in return for allowing associates to profit from contracts and other business with the state.
I went to trial in US District Court in Chicago in September 2005. I contested the charges, but after a long trial, that included the replacement of two jurors who had failed to disclose their criminal backgrounds, I was convicted. The jury returned its verdict in April 2006, concluding that I had—according to the prosecution’s theory—deprived Illinois citizens of their right to my honest services as a public official.
In September 2006, I was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. I read a statement to Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer before she imposed the sentence.
“When they elected me as the governor of this state, they expected better, and I let them down. For that, I apologize,” I said. “I should have been more vigilant. I should have been more watchful. I should have been a lot of things, I guess. But I obviously failed,” I said.
My lawyers appealed the conviction and in August 2007, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the jury’s verdict in a split decision. Judge Michael Kanne dissented, focusing on improper jury deliberations. He noted, “My colleagues in the majority concede that the trial of this case may not have been ‘picture-perfect’—a whopping understatement by any measure.”
My lawyers requested that the entire appeals court rehear the appeal as a group—a rehearing known as en banc—but the motion was denied. However, Judge Kanne was joined by two other judges, Ann Williams and Richard Posner, to declare that “a cascade of errors” had turned my trial, which lasted from September 2005 until April 2006, into “a travesty.”
Had I been granted a new trial as my lawyers contended I should have been, who knows what the verdict would have been the second time around? Some might say I would be reconvicted. Others would say differently. Both are speculation. If I learned anything during my study of the death penalty, it is that you can never tell what juries will do.
I entered Oxford Federal Correction Institution on November 7, 2007. Not long after, I was transferred to the federal prison in Terra Haute, Indiana, where I served my sentence in the minimum-security camp that is part of the prison structure.
In 2010, the US Supreme Court, in its decision, Skilling v. United States, held that the honest services law was restricted to the payment of bribes. Albert Alschuler filed a postconviction petition on my behalf noting that during the trial, of the eighty-three prosecution witnesses, none of them testified that I took anything from anybody to perform my official acts. That petition, however, was denied and a later appeal to the Seventh Circuit also was rejected. That decision later prompted Alschuler to write a scathing memoir for the Valparaiso University Law Review detailing how Appeals Court judge Frank Easterbrook engaged in numerous falsehoods. In the article titled, “How Frank Easterbrook Kept George Ryan in Prison,” Alschuler, a law professor at Northwestern Pritzker Law School and a highly-regarded legal scholar, said that I was “almost certainly punished for conduct that is not a crime.”
I am not here to debate what happened. It happened. I served my sentence and on January 30, 2013, I was released to home confinement in Kankakee. I officially completed my sentence on July 3, 2013.
I lost the love of my life, Lura Lynn, on June 24, 2011. I had been allowed to visit her bedside for two hours in January 2011. It was extraordinarily difficult. She recognized me, but struggled to be able to speak. Efforts by my lawyers to be released so I could spend the waning days of her life with her were rejected by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Three months later, on September 24, my older brother, Tom, died. I remained in prison for both funerals.
Since my release on July 3, 2013, I have resumed my life. I know all too well that when many people hear my name, they think first of my trial, the conviction, and the prison term. Yes, I went to prison. It happened, I got through it and I have moved on.
In February 2020, I turned eighty-six. I have slowed down a little over the years, but I’m not quite ready to give up on trying to make a difference in society. I have had a lot of time since 2003 to think about whether I’ve made a difference in this world.
I came to see the abolition of the death penalty as perhaps the greatest opportunity before me to leave the world a better place than what it is now. That belief—that feeling—has not subsided in me. If anything, after five years as a prisoner of the criminal prosecution system, I have an intimately better understanding of the fundamental reforms that are needed and the consequences of leaving things as they are.
While some people in Illinois saw my opposition to the death penalty as my attempt to divert attention away from my legal troubles, there were even more people who realized that my work to clean up the death penalty system and the federal investigation were two completely separate things.
They always were.
And they still are.
While I was reviewing the death row cases while considering whether to grant some commutations or a blanket commutation, Danny Edwards, the man convicted of killing my Kankakee neighbor, Steve Small, wrote me a letter. He said that he didn’t want his sentence commuted. He wanted to stay in the system and take his chances on death row. Would I please not commute his sentence?
I didn’t do that, of course. I commuted his sentence along with all the others on death row. The Small family was hurt and upset. I understood that because I was the man who commuted the sentence of the man who killed Steve.
I am sorry. I did what I thought I had to do and what was right at the time. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t saddened and hurt about what happened to Steve Small. In the end, I did what I felt had to be done for the system.
As tough as it was to do, I know it was the right thing to do.
And I would do it again.