The first time I met George Ryan was in 1999 at a small dinner party at the home of mutual friends. He was already governor of Illinois, but when the meal was over, he got up to clear his plate. That, my friends would tell me later, is George. Down to earth. Plainspoken. A straightforward person who would forever see himself as a family pharmacist from Kankakee.
I also learned that night that he possessed one of the most important assets of a successful politician—an absolute charmer of a wife. The late Lura Lynn, who I was lucky enough to frequently spend time within the coming years, was smart, frank, and slyly funny. Her death was, I am sure, a terrible blow to Governor Ryan; a loss made even more painful due to the fact that George Ryan was in the federal penitentiary when she passed.
Governor Ryan and Maurice Possley—who I knew as a top courthouse reporter during my eight years as a federal prosecutor—have told Governor Ryan’s remarkable story in the following pages, focusing on his dramatic journey confronting the death penalty. They have written a wonderfully lucid and compelling book. I was a close witness to some of the events they describe, but because the governor tells the story so well, I will let him speak for himself.
I do have a few personal comments to add. Governor Ryan’s bona fides on capital punishment were subject to frequent attack because by the time he declared a moratorium on executions in 2000, it was well-known publicly that he was under investigation by the US attorney’s office. A reckless truck driver, who killed six children in a fiery highway collision in Wisconsin, turned out to have bribed someone in the Illinois secretary of state’s office, the agency which handles vehicle licensing in Illinois, to get his driver’s license without having to go through the testing procedures. George Ryan had been the secretary of state at the time of the accident and the prosecutors kept turning stones until they were at his door after he was elected governor. I represented several witnesses in that grand jury investigation, including Ryan’s deputy governor, and from that limited vantage I couldn’t understand what the prosecutors were thinking. There was not a shred of evidence connecting George Ryan to that horrible, fatal accident. But because of my client’s interests, I kept close track of the trial evidence and attended a number of court sessions. To get the unpleasantries out of the way, despite my affection for Governor Ryan, I believe the evidence supported his conviction on corruption charges not related to the accident. That said, I also thought the manipulations that occurred with the jury during its deliberations, a plain effort to avoid repeating a months-long trial, violated the Constitution and deprived the governor of a fair trial. He should have gotten a new trial, in my view. But I would be lying if I said I expected a different outcome the second time around.
Importantly to me, however, what George Ryan was convicted of had nothing to do with his years in the governor’s mansion. The case was about what had happened years before in the secretary of state’s office. One thing you learn in a career practicing criminal law is that good and bad often sit side by side in people’s souls. And George Ryan did an enormous amount of good in his years of public service. He probably will turn out to be, in the judgment of history, the pivotal figure in the evolution of Americans’ attitudes toward capital punishment. But his career was far larger than one issue.
George Ryan’s four years as governor of Illinois was in my view the best gubernatorial term since I returned to Illinois in 1978. A long-time veteran of the Illinois General Assembly, the governor knew Springfield inside and out. He had strong relationships of many years standing with all legislative leaders, and in Illinois most major legislation passed as a result of deal-making between the so-called Four Tops, the speaker and minority leader in the Illinois House and their counterparts in the Illinois Senate. Watching the years of legislative stalemate that followed George Ryan’s time as governor, one can only marvel at how deft he was in getting things done. One reason he succeeded was because he was intensely nonideological. He held the line on taxes but dramatically increased Illinois’s spending on infrastructure, especially roads, while also significantly enhancing the state’s annual contribution to public education. He called himself a conservative, with good reason, but he refused to get caught up in the absolute positions of either the Left or Right. Pro-life, he nonetheless vetoed a bill to prohibit Medicaid payments for abortion because the bill’s sponsors insisted that poor women with serious health issues would have to go without. Governor Ryan didn’t want taxpayers to have to pay for abortion on demand. Yet it was just cruel, in his view, to tell women with no options that they would have to sacrifice their health and carry a child to full term. In another significant action, he traveled to Cuba, notwithstanding the long time US embargo on Cuban goods, in the hope of drumming up business for Illinois enterprises. Even communists’ money is green, I am sure George Ryan would tell you. And on the issue on which I dealt with him most frequently—capital punishment—I found him courageous and entirely earnest.
By 2000, thirteen men who had been convicted and sentenced to death had been exonerated, that is, found legally blameless for the murders for which they once had sat on death row. Facing mounting evidence that the Illinois capital system was grotesquely prone to error—thirteen exonerations with 171 people sitting on death row—Governor Ryan declared a moratorium on executions. With his political gifts, George Ryan understood the one point of consensus between the overwhelming majority of death penalty supporters and opponents: capital punishment could not mean putting innocent people to death.
To ensure that did not happen, Governor Ryan appointed a fourteen-member commission made up of people who had diverse experiences with capital punishment, whether as prosecutors or defense lawyers or ordinary citizens. The job of the Commission on Capital Punishment, as the governor described it, was to figure out “what reforms, if any, would ensure that the Illinois capital punishment system is fair, just and accurate.” I was one of the fourteen persons the governor asked to serve on the commission because I’d had some experience as a pro bono lawyer representing people who’d been sentenced to death. One of those thirteen Illinois men previously exonerated had been my client, the victim of ugly behavior by prosecutors who spent a decade fighting the fact—ultimately corroborated by DNA—that another man had committed the murder for which my client once sat on death row. After he was freed, due to the work of more than a dozen committed defense attorneys over thirteen years, I took on another death row case, critically different because, this time, I realized that my client had committed the crime. But in many ways that case showed even deeper and more abiding problems with capital punishment: I could see from the start that there were countless mitigating factors in that case, and that my client would never have been sentenced to death if he had more diligent and better-funded public defenders. Fortunately, my colleagues and I at Dentons, our firm, eventually convinced the courts of that point, and our client was resentenced to spend fifty years in prison if he met the terms for parole late in his life.
Thus, when I was appointed to the Commission on Capital Punishment, I had witnessed firsthand the system’s many problems that could lead the innocent or undeserving to be sentenced to death. Even so, after my years as a prosecutor, I still wasn’t completely sure that there weren’t cases when the death penalty was appropriate. My own doubts led me to have great sympathy for Governor Ryan’s own journey and the sincerity with which he made it.
The twenty-four months I spent on the commission were among the most involved and worthwhile of my legal career. And they allowed me to sort out my conflicted feelings about the death penalty. All in all, I realized that capital punishment was a bad idea, not because there weren’t cases where death was arguably a fit punishment, but because we would never design a legal system able to identify only the right cases for execution. Capital punishment, no matter how carefully practiced, would inevitably mean occasionally putting to death the innocent or the undeserving.
My own struggle to think systematically about capital punishment mirrored that of my fellow commission members who were remarkably diligent in embracing the assignment we had from Governor Ryan. As a group, we started out with diverse points of view about capital punishment and that was true at the end. But we were unanimous in believing the system in Illinois required extensive reform. Overall, we made eighty-five recommendations for specific measures that needed to be adopted; everything from how interrogations of suspects should be conducted to avoid the phenomenon of false confession to the requirements for funding capital defense.
The Illinois General Assembly enacted none of those measures, leaving George Ryan in an impossible position as he approached the end of his term. What was the right response to a system that public study had shown to be riddled with inequities and haunted by error? How could he be faithful to the commitment he’d made when imposing the moratorium, that executions would resume only when the fairness and accuracy of the capital punishment system could be guaranteed?
Here I need to say that I have never comprehended the arguments of people who think George Ryan’s response to the problems of capital punishment was driven by ulterior motives. Some seem to believe that Ryan was somehow preparing for his subsequent indictment and trial. But no one has ever made a coherent argument to me on that point. For one thing, I doubt Governor Ryan ever really expected to be indicted. More important, the death penalty for years had been one of those third-rail issues, damaging to political careers. That, frankly, was why the General Assembly had done nothing, because inaction, despite the massive problems, was the safest course politically. If George Ryan supposedly had an eye on the jury he might face, it made no sense for him to take any action that risked antagonizing so many voters who would make up the pool of potential jurors.
As I watched the governor wrestle with the question of what to do in the waning days of his term, I saw a person of deep faith and good conscience trying to sort out an impossibly complicated issue. As he was pondering his choices, I advised him to take a moderate course. I was afraid that any dramatic action, like clearing death row, would inspire an intense public backlash that would set back any hope of reforming the capital system.
But George Ryan wasn’t interested in playing a political guessing game. More moderate measures would not have solved the fundamental problem that the capital system didn’t function fairly. Instead, just before he left office, Governor Ryan pardoned four more people who were demonstrably innocent and commuted to life in prison without parole the death sentences of 163 men and four women on death row. His actions provoked howls of outrage from prosecutors and police. But to the surprise of many, including me, Illinoisans were surprisingly understanding of the fact that George Ryan had been left with no choice: a system with documented failures that the legislature had refused to correct. Polling in the aftermath showed that roughly half of Illinois voters agreed with the governor’s action.
That response inspired a young Illinois senator, a guy I’d known for years and called “Barack” in those days, to spearhead an effort to pass a number of legislative reforms based on the commission’s findings. I worked with him occasionally, more or less representing the commission’s point of view, and Senator Obama succeeded in shepherding his bill to passage. It was a brave thing for him to do, since he was frank about his ambition to run for higher office. Although I never heard then-Senator Obama say this, it might well have been the case that he felt inspired by George Ryan’s example and his willingness to do the right thing, even at the risk of making his conviction in his forthcoming trial more likely.
George Ryan’s successor, the Democrat Rod Blagojevich (who, yes, spent years in the federal penitentiary) facing the mixed public response to George Ryan’s commutations, found it most practical to keep the moratorium in place. But the long period without executions, which had begun with George Ryan, slowly convinced Illinoisans that nobody particularly missed the death penalty, especially after the Great Recession when the state had much greater needs for its limited funds. On March 9, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn, who had taken office when Rod Blagojevich was impeached following his federal arrest, signed the legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois. It was a remarkable change on an essential policy issue, one where the public had been willing to learn from experience and to adhere to the widely held moral consensus that whatever the value of the death penalty, it wasn’t worth executing innocent persons. And in making that change, in moving an entire state, and perhaps a nation, no one was more important than George Ryan.
—Scott Turow
author of The Last Trial (Grand Central, 2020)