Two days after his stunning decision to clear Illinois’s death row, Governor Ryan left his office on Monday having ignited a firestorm of controversy over the commutations, but having garnered the admiration of death penalty foes around the world.
The decision by Illinois governor George Ryan on Saturday to grant blanket clemency to all of Illinois death row inmates was seen as a huge public relations coup for the capital punishment reform movement.
Even critics of judicial execution, riding high on a wave of public concern about miscarriages of justice and widespread inequities in the system, do not imagine it is the beginning of a trend, however.
As an outgoing governor with barely 48 hours left in office when he made his bombshell announcement, Ryan was not subject to the type of political pressure that many career politicians concerned with re-election are.
”It was a big domino that fell,” said Lawrence Marshall, legal director of Northwestern University’s Centre on Wrongful Convictions.
The decision puts other politicians under pressure to restore public faith in the system, but ”there’s a real dearth of leadership who are willing to take risks,” he added.
”I don’t think we will see a clearing out of death rows across the country,” concurred Richard Dieter, executive director of the pro-reform Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.
”Most states think their systems are better than Illinois.”
In fact, Illinois already had one of the higher exoneration
rates in capital cases: 17 of the 106 death row inmates who had their sentences reversed since the US Supreme Court’s 1976 decision to reinstate capital punishment came from this Midwestern state.
Legal activists claim the figure reflects an increased willingness to review capital cases rather than any particular indictment of the system here.
A number of studies have shown that the poor legal representation provided defendants in capital cases and the overwhelming numbers of minorities on death row are not problems unique to Illinois — they’re equally common in Texas or the federal death penalty system.
But Ryan’s historic decision to commute all 167 death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole — unprecedented in scope in modern US history — does build on the growing public unease over the integrity and reliability of judicial execution.
Executions soared through the 1990s, peaking at 98 in 1999, as a tough-on-crime sentiment appeared to grip juries, prosecutors and judges.
But the national number slipped to 85 in 2000, 66 in 2001, and 71 in 2003, as death row inmates were exonerated in several high-profile cases and a greater caution seemed to pervade the system.
Statistics also reflected a decline in the rate of death sentences being handed out — down to 155 in 2001, the lowest in three decades, according to the Justice Department.
The number of inmates on the nation’s death rows also decreased for the first time since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, falling from 3 601 in 2000 to 3 581 in 2001.
A ruling by the US Supreme Court that the execution of the mentally retarded was unconstitutional in June 2002 lent momentum to the reform movement, even if it stalled a couple of months later in October when the justices refused to consider banning the execution of juveniles.
But activists draw hope from the continuing public scrutiny on the death penalty.
”There has been a lot of debate,” said Paul Robinson, a Northwestern University law professor and a former prosecutor.
”Whether that public discussion will turn into reform, that is a trickier question.”
According to a recent Gallup poll in the United States, 70% favored the death penalty, down from 80% in the mid-1990s.
However, just 53% say it is applied fairly, according to the poll.
In the week prior to granting the commutations, former South African president Nelson Mandela and his compatriot Archbishop Desmond Tutu got in touch with Ryan urging him to show compassion for the death row inmates.
Ryan also spoke by telephone to Mexican President Vincente Fox: three Mexicans were among those given a reprieve from the death chamber on Saturday.
The United States remains at odds with much of the rest of the world in continuing the practice of capital punishment, according to a recent Amnesty International.
The London-based rights group, which opposes the practice, said the death penalty is either formally banned or has fallen out of use in 111 countries out of 195, and that some 40 countries have dropped the death penalty in the past 20 years alone. – Sapa-AFP