Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Page A

Governor received no help or cover from anyone else. No one—not the legislature, the prosecutors, the candidates, or even the Commission on which I served—offered George Ryan any alternatives. He had either to accept the results of a system everyone agreed needed to be fixed or to act by himself. The latter course was not especially appealing, because as the year moved to a close, legal proceedings began in federal court in the criminal racketeering case against Scott Fawell, George Ryan’s former chief of staff in the Secretary of State’s Office, and against the Governor’s campaign fund. In its pretrial filings, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made clear that there would be testimony that the Governor might have had some role in unsavory doings. For Ryan, facing the increasing prospect that he would be in front of a jury himself, locking arms with the most unpopular minority group imaginable—convicted first-degree murderers—was not an appealing course.
    But the Governor had been emphatic, especially once the Commission report detailed the long-running problems in Illinois’ capital system, that he would address the cases that system had produced. Cynics claimed that in declaring the moratorium or reviewing the death row clemency petitions, Ryan was attempting to create a legacy that could compete in history books with the ignominy of the criminal conviction they saw as forthcoming. But this view of Ryan offers no explanation of other principled acts he took in this area, ones garnering him no special attention. For example, Governor Ryan twice vetoed bills that would have added new eligibility factors to the Illinois death penalty, because he regarded the statute as overly broad already.
    I have no special insight into what drove George Ryan’s decisions. If the government’s five-year investigation of Ryan had any influence on his views about clemency, I suspect it was by providing a firsthand experience of how unfettered prosecutorial power essentially is. In my practice, I’ve seen federal grand jury investigations turn law-and-order conservatives into dues-paying members of the ACLU. It’s even conceivable that George Ryan wanted to do the right thing as Governor because he felt he’d done wrong things in the past. Certainly I think the Governor’s deep religious beliefs, which he refuses to wear on his sleeve, had a place here. Whatever the motives, though, George Ryan’s refusal to duck the clemency issue despite its perils to him personally was inspiring to me, as he often was.
    Initially, the Governor had spoken about a blanket clemency for all on death row. When the public hearings began, he had back-pedaled, promising the victim families he would evaluate matters case by case. After seeing The Exonerated , he again began to wonder aloud about clemency for all. His vacillation infuriated many observers, but I had no trouble understanding why Ryan was wrestling so fitfully with the issue.
    As the time for decision drew near, reporters and others asked my opinion about what the Governor should do. I had no comment for the record, but privately I was against blanket clemency. I favored reducing sentences to life without parole in the many cases infected by the problems outlined in the Commission report. My approach would have commuted, for example, those who had been death—sentenced for felony-murder, or whose convictions rested on jailhouse snitch or accomplice testimony, or whose confessions were not well corroborated. I would have made lifers out of most, but not all, on death row, hoping to show some deference to the popular will in favor of capital punishment. I feared that a blanket commutation might inspire a powerful backlash that would scuttle all hope for reform. As an attorney, I also worried that the reliability of the law as an institution could be brought into question when the work of many years by police, prosecutors, judges, and