The Nobel Peace Prize to George Ryan

2011 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan

2011-01-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

2011 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan

University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle nominated retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous, heroic, and principled opposition to the racist and class-based death penalty.

The Illinois General Assembly just voted to abolish the death penalty--a life-long objective of Professor Boyle, a Native Illinoisan. See his article "Teaching Against the Death Penalty," 21 J. Development Alternatives & Areas Studies, No. 1 & 2, at 90-96 (March-June 2002), which recounts his experiences at teaching against the death penalty since his arrival at the College of Law in August of 1978.

Together with his former student Karen Conti and her partner Greg Adamski, they served as Co-Counsel to prevent the execution of convicted mass-murderer John Wayne Gacey by then Illinois Governor Jim Edgar. The three of them won a Request for a Stay of Execution by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to Governor Edgar on the grounds that the Illinois lethal injection procedure constituted torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Nevertheless, Governor Edgar violated this Request and illegally tortured Mr. Gacey to death over a period of eighteen minutes.

But thanks to Governor George Ryan there have been no similar executions by the State of Illinois for over a decade.

Boyle was elected by the 200,000 members of Amnesty International USA to serve two two- year terms on their Board of Directors from 1988 to 1992. The Nobel Peace Prize Winning Amnesty International is an abolitionist organization that will work to prevent the execution of any human being for any reason. So will Professor Boyle. Amnesty International also opposes the torture of human beings for any reason. So does Professor Boyle.

For information :

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (Voice)
217-244-1478 (Fax)
(personal comments only)

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize

2010-01-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.thenobelpeaceprizetoryan.com/2010nobel.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – JANUARY 6, 2010

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize

Francis A. Boyle, long-standing, distinguished Professor of International Law and Human Rights, announces his nomination of retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

“The lives of about 3297 people on death rows throughout the United States of America stand in the balance. For the sake of them all, I respectfully request that you award the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to George Ryan,” Boyle states in nominating Ryan.

The former Illinois governor’s courageous opposition to the death penalty initiated the groundwork for the Moratorium Movement when in the year 2000 he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium and emptied Illinois’ death row, the first such action in this country.
Due directly through Gov. Ryan’s pioneering efforts, the number of death sentences and the number of executions carried out in this country has reached a historical low, and has given promise to the end of the death penalty in the United States.

The year 2009 marked a historical landmark with the publication of The Death Penalty Information Center’s report "The Death Penalty in 2009: Year End Report” on December 18, noting that the country is expected to finish 2009 with the fewest death sentences since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Eleven states considered abolishing the death penalty this year, a significant increase in legislative activity from previous years, as the high costs and lack of measurable benefits associated with this punishment troubled lawmakers. In 2009 New Mexico became the 15th American state to repeal the death penalty.

According to Boyle: "Nothing could strike a more powerful blow against the death penalty in the United States and around the world" than for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to give their 2010 Award to Ryan.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle

Law Building

504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.

Champaign,

IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954(voice)

217-244-1478(fax)

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

2010-01-05T04:52:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - JANUARY 21, 2009

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

Francis A. Boyle, long-standing Professor of International Law and Human Rights, has nominated retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
George Ryan's courageous opposition to the death penalty initiated the groundwork for the Moratorium Movement when in the year 2000 he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium, the first in this country.

The moratorium placed on all executions by the United States Supreme Court in 2007 can directly be attributed to Ryan's principled vision and tireless work to guarantee human rights by abolishing the death penalty both in the United States and around the world.

Although the monumental development of a moratorium was a short-lived reality, the number of death sentences and the number of executions carried out in this country have reached a historical low, and has given promise to the end of the death penalty in the United States -- all thanks to the inspired and driven dedication of one man, retired Illinois Governor George H. Ryan.

In the US 37 executions took place in 2008, marking a 14-year low and continuing a downward trend that began in 2000.

95% of all executions occurred in the South in 2008; 49% were in one state - Texas.
As stated by Professor Boyle, "George Ryan is the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America. Thanks to George Ryan, the death penalty is on its last legs here in the United States. It is up to the rest of us to kill it off!"

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle

Law Building

504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.

Champaign,

IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954(voice)

217-244-1478(fax)

Healing

2008-07-05T07:58:00.001-07:00

"The death penalty is about revenge and hate, and revenge and hate is why my daughter and those 167 other people are dead today."

Bud Welch, father of Julie Marie Welch,
victim in the Oklahoma City bombing

"I have come to believe that the death penalty is not what will help me heal. Responding to one killing with another killing does not honor my daughter, nor does it help create the kind of society I want to live in, where human life and human rights are valued. I know that an execution creates another grieving family, and causing pain to another family does not lessen my own pain."

MVFHR board member, Vicki Schieber, testifying to the Subcommittee on the Constitution,
Civil Rights and Property Rights; Committee on the Judiciary; US Senate, February 2006

Deadline - The movie

2008-01-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

Governor George H. Ryan

During a single term as governor of Illinois from 1999 to 2003, Republican George H. Ryan made a name for himself by advocating for the reform of his state’s troubled capital punishment system. As a state legislator, he voted to bring the death penalty back to Illinois in 1977 after the Supreme Court’s Gregg v. Georgia decision. In 2000, after major problems in the system came to his attention, Governor Ryan issued a moratorium on all executions in Illinois and established a commission to evaluate Illinois’ entire capital punishment system. In 2003, after the commission issued its exhaustive study that documented serious flaws, he ordered special one-hour clemency hearings for every person on death row. At the end of his term as governor, he pardoned 4 death row inmates with strong claims of innocence, and commuted to life in prison the sentences of the remaining 167 inmates awaiting execution in Illinois. This was the first time any governor of any state in the union had issued a “blanket clemency�? of this magnitude, and it underscored Governor Ryan’s fear that the flawed administration of Illinois’ capital punishment laws might some day lead to the execution of an innocent man or woman. A one-time pharmacist from the small town of Kankakee, Governor Ryan retired from politics after the end of his gubernatorial term in 2003. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 and 2004.

Learn More

The Center on Wrongful Convictions
One of the driving forces behind Governor Ryan's decision was this organization which is dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful convictions and other serious miscarriages of justice in Illinois and around the country. The organization consists of lawyers, professors, and Northwestern Law Students dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful cases of criminal justice.

The Center's website also includes information about each of the Illinois' innocence cases, including Anthony Porter whose exoneration influenced Governor Ryan's decision to place a moratorium on the death penalty. Download the brief that was co-written by one of Northwestern's journalism students, Shawn Armbrust, who is featured in the film.

The Death Penalty Information Center's Section on Illinois' Commission on Capital Punishment
The Death Penalty Information Center has assembled press materials and Web links to provide easy access to information regarding the work of the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment, a blue-ribbon panel that has recently completed the nation's most comprehensive state review of the death penalty. The Commission's findings and recommendations captured the attention of lawmakers and legal experts throughout the nation who are watching closely to track the impact of this review beyond Illinois. The Commission's recommendations aim to address problems Illinois Governor George Ryan identified including potential safeguards to prevent the possible conviction and execution of innocent inmates.

The Deadline DVD features more of Governor Ryan, including additional excerpts from his interview with the directors and his clemency speech, as well as a “Ryan and the Death Penalty�? timeline.

Read more about Illinois in our state by state map.

Supreme Court Looks At Death Penalty

2008-01-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

Last updated 1:29 pm CT January 08, 2008

Supreme Court Looks At Death Penalty

The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments Monday about whether lethal injections violate a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Attorneys for two Kentucky death row inmates argue the injections cause undue suffering. If the court agrees. Illinois along with 13 other states would have to change their laws before resuming executions.

Executions nationwide are on hold until the Supreme Court rules. Sarah Heyer sits on the board of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. She questions whether executions give closure to victims and their families.

"It's more painful for the families to have to be brought back in again and again, where with life without parole you can just put them away and shut the door," said Heyer.

Former Governor George Ryan stayed more than 170 executions before leaving office. and placed a moratorium on the death penalty after more than a dozen inmates were exonerated.

According to the FBI- the climb in violent crime the past two years is over. The agency reports violent crime, including murders, rapes and robberies, dropped by nearly 2% between January and June of 2007.

The data shows that violent crime dropped dramatically in cities of a million or more residents.there murders decreased by 6.5% and rapes by 14%. Smaller cities and rural areas, however, saw a slight one percentage point *increase* in violence.

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize

2008-01-08T08:35:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - JANUARY 6, 2008

George H. Ryan is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize

University of Illinois Law and Human Rights Professor Francis A. Boyle has nominated George H. Ryan for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. The current growing moratorium movement spreading across the United States is a reality directly connected to Ryan's courageous opposition to the death penalty both in the US and around the world, and to his visionary action to impose the first US moratorium against the death penalty in 2000.

Due to George Ryan's commitment to humanitarian principles and his tireless efforts to create dialogue in support of seeking justice for the 3,350 men and women warehoused on death rows throughout the US, the United States Supreme Court has in effect imposed a nation wide moratorium on executions. George Ryan's dream to end governmental killing has temporarily come to fruition.

The growing momentum for the outright abolition of the death penalty in the United States is due to the heroic efforts of George H. Ryan. He has done more effective work against the death penalty than the entire American Abolitionist Movement put together. For that reason the world should award him the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

For information contact :

Francis A. Boyle

Law Building

504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.

Champaign, IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954 (phone)

217-244-1478 (fax)

fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

http://www.thenobelpeaceprizetoryan.com/

Chicago Near Police Torture Settlement

2008-01-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

Chicago Near Police Torture Settlement

14 hours ago

CHICAGO (AP) — The city is near approval of a $20 million settlement that would end lawsuits brought by four former death-row inmates whose claims of police torture led to a re-examination of capital punishment.

Final paperwork has been approved, and the City Council can vote on the settlement next week, city law department spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle said Friday.

The council was supposed to vote last month, but paperwork problems postponed the action.

The four inmates — Aaron Patterson, Leroy Orange, Stanley Howard and Madison Hobley — claim they were tortured by police and wrongly convicted. George Ryan, governor at the time, pardoned them in 2003 and commuted the sentences of every death row inmate in the state.

George Ryan is nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize

2008-01-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

I just nominated George Ryan for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous and heroic opposition to the death penalty, that has now culminated in the National Moratorium that we now see in the United States.

fab.

Francis A. Boyle

Law Building

504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.

Champaign, IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954 (Voice)

217-244-1478 (Fax)

(personal comments only)

Torture, American style

2007-12-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

A 19th-century image shows federal troops employing several forms of torture. One man stood on a barrel for several hours; another carried a large log, his leg weighted with a ball and chain; a third was bound to a tree with his arms raised above his head; a fourth sat on the ground, tied. (Corbis)

By Darius Rejali
December 16, 2007

NEARLY EVERY MONTH, it seems, news reports carry disturbing revelations about torture by American soldiers, intelligence officers, or allies. Just by reading the news we learn things we never wanted to know about waterboarding, forced standing for hours, and sleep deprivation; most recently the CIA has destroyed videotapes showing a suspected terrorist being interrogated with techniques that an agent called torture.

more stories like thisBehind these disclosures, as they reach our ears, runs a powerful current of disbelief and shock: it is hard to imagine that such things would be done by Americans.

We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas - the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is "the method of the enemy."

But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn't an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn't just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.

None of this is to say that democracies have a worse record of torture than authoritarian states: dictators deserve their reputation for violence and cruelty. But the role of democracies is central. Painful as it is to confront, knowing how - and why - democracies have played such an important role in torture also has a hopeful side: it suggests that democracies can also halt torture. In fact, they have a special responsibility to do so.

. . .

The word "torture" still evokes medieval images - the rack, the iron maiden, thumbscrews. Authoritarian states historically chose torture techniques that were as painful as possible, and torturers often scarred their victims deliberately, using their damaged bodies as a deterrent and an advertisement of state power. Kings used torture to demonstrate that they could take lives or show mercy as they willed.

For centuries, the whip was the preferred tool of state torture, and some were nastier than others. The Great Russian Knout, for example, had a hook on the end of it that tore out chunks of flesh with each blow. Even the Nazis, well into the era of modern torture, favored whips, as they scarred their way across thousands of victims in prisons and concentration camps during World War II.

In recent times states have outlawed open spectacles of torture, and torture has ceased to be an exhibit of kingly power. But its basic uses remain the same: extracting information, forcing false confessions, and keeping prisoners docile and compliant.

So torture hasn't really disappeared in the modern age. What have disappeared are forms of torture that leave marks. The police, military investigators, and governments in democratic societies can count on the press and people watching. They know that if a prisoner can't show any marks of torture, people are far less likely to believe his or her story. So as societies have become more open, the art of torture has crept underground and evolved into the chilling new forms - often undetectable - that define torture today.

Take electrotorture. In the early days of electric power, most authorities avoided using electricity for torture because it was too dangerous: it tended to kill its victims, and dead subjects yield no information. But in 1899, two research teams, one American and one Swiss, correctly identified the biological processes that caused electrical death. This knowledge proved to be critical: A proper torture device, it appeared, had to deliver painful high voltages with low amperage.

The earliest recorded electortorture device was an American machine called the "hummingbird" (1908), likely nicknamed because it hummed with electrical current as it was applied to the body. We know little about it; it appears in the writings of the anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman, who received letters from prisoners describing its use.

Early 20th-century America was a breeding ground for new ideas in electric torture, many documented by American Bar Association investigators in their 1931 Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement. Between 1922 and 1926, the Seattle police chief got his confessions from a cell with a wall-to-wall electrified carpet. "The prisoner leaps, screaming in agony, into the air....It is not fatal, its effects are not lasting, and it leaves no marks," remarked the ABA report. And until 1929, the police in Helena, Ark., used an improvised electrical chair to extract confessions. At the time, the sheriff testified that the chair came with other office furniture, and he had inherited it from "a long line of former county sheriffs."

Still, these devices were rather crude compared with what electrotorture would become. The most famous electrotorture device was adjustable, portable, and based on the magneto, a simple generator that produces a high-voltage spark. The idea of using a magneto generator for torture came to be closely associated with the Nazis, who employed it ruthlessly in France and Belgium during World War II. But it wasn't the Germans who developed it: It was the French colonial police, the Sûreté, who pioneered the technique and used it throughout the 1930s fighting Vietnamese nationalists. The Nazis learned about the technology from a Vichy police officer, Inspector Marty of Toulouse, in 1942.

Although the Gestapo carried magneto torture to Paris and Belgium, the key distributors of magneto torture after the war were the United States and France. The French resumed magneto torture in Vietnam as early as 1947, passing it to the South Vietnamese, who passed the technique to American military interrogators during the Vietnam War. The Americans introduced magneto torture into Brazil in the late 1960s, and - just as the French had - the Americans eventually brought it home. Chicago police used magneto torture in the 1970s and 1980s to extract confessions. Most alleged incidents implicated Commander Jon Burge, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and the detectives he supervised.

Electrotorture is only one example of how torture spreads via democracies. "Forced standing" is a technique used in the Soviet Union and made famous by the hooded men of Abu Ghraib: They were forced to stand for hours, balanced on a box with the threat of electric torture if they collapsed. It is not nearly as harmless as it sounds: Humans are not designed to stand utterly immobile, and accounts of the practice from Soviet-era victims and psychologists hired by the CIA describe immense pain.

Though forced standing is often associated with the interrogations of Stalin's secret police, the British had already refined the use of forced standing to intimidate and coerce prisoners. From 1910 to 1930, the practice was well known in Irish prisons and in British Indian penal colonies in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The British colonial police also used it in Mandatory Palestine, where they were especially concerned about keeping torture "clean": They knew scarred victims would create a scandal at home, and they knew the Nazi publicity machine would use evidence of torture for German advantage in the Middle East. Forced standing was also known in French contexts, and, in the United States, was a standard slave punishment that by the 1920s became part of American police interrogations and prison punishments. Before the 1930s, then, forced standing was the special province of democratic, not authoritarian states. W.G. Krivitsky, an Soviet secret police agent who defected, described Soviet interrogation techniques in 1939 as "improved by Stalin on the model of the latest American methods."

Some techniques date to well before the 20th century, but still owe their modern forms to the innovations of democratic states. The use of water in torture, for example, is quite old, but most historical autocrats liked to boil their prisoners. The modern use of waterboarding can be traced back to the Philippines, where in 1902 American troops were fighting the insurgency. Returning soldiers brought water torture back to their civilian jobs as policemen in the 1910s, and it soon appeared in military prisons and police stations in large cities and small towns, especially in the American South.

By the 1920s, one can find the full encyclopedia of modern water torture already written up in American newspaper accounts and trial transcripts. One technique involved choking the victim, either with full body immersion, by covering the face with a handkerchief, or simply ladling water on the face of a prisoner as he is tilted head downward. This is the basis of modern waterboarding, and it would subsequently appear worldwide.

When we examine the history of modern torture technique by technique - and there are dozens of examples - we find that newer, "cleaner" tortures first appear in conditions of public monitoring, usually in democratic states. It is only afterward that we find authoritarian states adopting them.

If the spread of torture techniques suggests a blurry line between "us" and "them," it also teaches that there's no real boundary between "there" and "here." It would be ignoring history to assume that what happens in an American-run prison in Iraq will stay in Iraq. Soldiers who learn torture techniques abroad get jobs as police when they return, and the new developments in torture you read about today could yet be employed in a neighborhood near you.

In Chicago, in the decade after Vietnam, the use of magnetos and other clean tortures left a disaster: At least 11 men were sentenced to death and many others given long-term prison sentences based on confessions extracted by torture, and in 2003, Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted the death sentences of all 167 death row inmates. Earlier this month the City of Chicago agreed to pay nearly $20 million to settle lawsuits filed by four former death row inmates who claimed they were tortured and wrongly convicted.

Everything torture represents - intimidation, abuse of public trust, extraction of false confessions, the blind eye of officials - is antithetical to the way democratic societies are supposed to work. But "clean" torture, leaving few marks and practiced behind closed doors, permits a kind of public silence or amnesia. The facts of Abu Ghraib were already known through testimony, but there was no public outcry until the scandalous photographs made it impossible to ignore. Even after Abu Ghraib, lawyers for Guantánamo detainees doubted allegations of torture until FBI e-mails confirmed them. Today, American authorities still shy away from the T-word, preferring terms such as "abuse" and "enhanced interrogation."

The disturbing political implication of clean torture is that we are less likely to complain about violence if it is committed by stealth. Indeed, we are less likely even to have the opportunity to complain. This is not because we are indifferent (thought it is certainly possible), but because we are often uncertain whether violence occurred at all. We are, in effect, illiterate in stealth torture, and this has political consequences. When people can't speak intelligently about cruelty, they aren't likely to be able to protect themselves against tyranny at home.

Still, history shows that the cycle of torture can be broken. Americans put an end to most domestic torture between 1930 and 1950. We did this, in part, by exposing torture. The American Bar Association's 1931 report transformed American law and policing. The document was cited in court decisions; newspapers and true crime books drew on the group's investigations to educate the public as to what the modern face of torture was. And police chiefs instituted more checks on police behavior, including clear punishments for violations of the law and regular medical inspections for detainees.

Many European states now have reasonably good records on torture precisely because they call torture techniques by their proper names, give them histories, and institute strong domestic and international monitoring of police, prisons, and asylums. The French have a far better human rights record now than they did in the 1960s, even if it is by no means perfect. There is no reason why America cannot restore its own reputation.

The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that torturers care what the public thinks. For more than a century torturers have voted with their hands: Governments that continue to use torture have moved to techniques that leave little trace. The same public pressure - built on unequivocal disapproval - should eventually be able to bring an end to this sorry history. Strange as it may seem, torturers and their apologists really do care.

Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College, is the author of "Torture and Democracy," out this month.

UN Assembly calls for death penalty ban

2007-12-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

New York (dpa) - The UN General Assembly on Tuesday voted 104-54 to adopt a
moratorium on the death penalty, defeating vocal opposition from countries
that maintain the practice does not violate human rights.

Countries that favour ending the death penalty are a uniformed bloc, arguing
the practice "undermines human dignity" and that a moratorium "contributes
to the enhancement and progressive development of human rights."

"There is no conclusive evidence of the death penalty's deterrence value and
that any miscarriage or failure of justice in the death penalty's
implementation is irreversible and irreparable," the proponents said in the
resolution adopted by the 192-nation assembly. There were 29 abstentions.

The resolution submitted by more than 90 countries, including most Europeans
nations, voiced concern about the continued use of the death penalty and
demanded that the UN "establish a moratorium on executions with a view to
abolishing the death penalty."

It called on countries that still apply the death penalty to respect
international standards that provide safeguards guaranteeing the rights of
sentenced prisoners and to "progressively restrict the use of the death
penalty and reduce the number of offences for which it may be imposed."

Countries that opposed the moratorium renewed their criticism before the
vote, a replay of the debate last month in the human rights committee of the
assembly. Opponents included the block of 13 Caribbean nations and others
like Singapore, which accused Europeans of imposing their values on other
sovereign nations.

There are 134 countries that have abolished the death penalty.

But countries that continue to use it, like the United States and China,
have remained mostly silent during the whole debate.

Despite Washington's official stance on maintaining the death penalty, New
Jersey on Monday became the first US state to abolish the sentence in more
than 40 years, as Governor Jon Corzine signed into law a measure eliminating
it.

New Jersey joined 13 other US states that do not allow executions.

"Today New Jersey evolves," Corzine, a Democrat, said in a statement. "This
is a day of progress for us and for the millions of people across our nation
and around the globe who reject the death penalty as a moral or practical
response to the grievous, even heinous, crime of murder."

Before the final vote in the UN General Assembly Tuesday, the human rights
committee voted 99-52, with 33 abstentions, last month to approve the
moratorium, and sent the draft to the 192-nation assembly for a final vote.

The issue split the committee into two camps, with the Europeans, led by
Italy, on one side against mostly small countries in the Caribbean, Africa
and the Middle East that said the death penalty is not a human rights issue.

Chicago Deal to Pay $20 Million in Police Torture Case Hits Roadblock

2007-12-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

The City of Chicago’s landmark decision to pay nearly $20 million dollars to four former death row prisoners tortured by Chicago police has hit a roadblock. The four men—all African American—sued former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and more than twenty officers who worked with him, alleging that they were coerced into falsely confessing to murder in the 1980s. We speak with John Conroy, the investigative reporter who brought the story to the fore eighteen years ago. He was recently laid off from the Chicago Reader. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

John Conroy, investigative journalist and author. He brought the torture story to light eighteen years ago and has covered it since for the Chicago Reader. He was laid off five days ago. He is also the author of “Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: The City of Chicago’s landmark decision to pay nearly $20 million to four former death row prisoners tortured by Chicago police has hit a roadblock. The four men are all African American. They sued former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and more than twenty officers who worked with him, alleging that they were coerced into falsely confessing to murder. The City had agreed to a $19.8 million settlement on Friday. But on Wednesday, last-minute legal complications arose in settlements with Stanley Howard and Aaron Patterson, two of the former prisoners involved in the lawsuit. Initial reports suggest this could cause a lengthy delay in all four cases.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2006, special prosecutors released a long-awaited report stating there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Burge and four other former officers abused suspects to extract confessions in the ’80s. Charges have never been filed against Jon Burge, who oversaw the torture.

John Conroy was the investigative reporter who brought the story to the fore eighteen years ago. He has consistently covered it ever since. However, Conroy was among four reporters at the Chicago Reader dismissed last week in a cost-saving measure by the paper’s parent company, Creative Loafing.

John Conroy joins us now from Chicago. Welcome to Democracy Now!, John.

JOHN CONROY: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance first? We’ll talk about the roadblock to the agreement in a minute, but the $20 million, how was it arrived at? Who does it go to? What happened to them?

JOHN CONROY: Well, it went to—it’s supposed to go to four survivors of the torture, all of whom had served time on death row for crimes they hadn’t committed. And the roadblock, I don’t think, is terribly significant in the grand scheme of things. This case has been—these cases were filed in 2003. And I don’t think that a month or two in the grand scheme of things is going to matter a great deal.

However, one complicating factor is that one of the former prisoners, who is now back in prison, Aaron Patterson, had signed a loan agreement based on—there are companies out there who make loans to people, highly speculative loans, high-risk loans, you might say, at verified interest rates, and Patterson took out one of these loans early on. I don’t recall the exact figure, but it might have been $50,000, and it’s now way up in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps nearing a million or more. So the longer there is a delay in settling Patterson, the higher the price tag could go. So that is one thing adding pressure on the Patterson people to settle and on the city to wrap it up.

I think it’s another month, and it will be wrapped up. The things that are blocking it right now weren’t that significant.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, John Conroy, for those of our viewers and listeners who may not be familiar with the specifics of these four cases, could you talk a little bit about how the cases developed and the nature of the torture that they were subjected to?

JOHN CONROY: Yes. These four cases, they’re four men who were pardoned by Governor Ryan in 2003, but they are just the tip of the iceberg, really. There were more than a hundred men who were tortured using electric shock with either a cattle prod, a hand-cranked device much like an Army field phone, or a third device which I believe was a now-extinct medical device called a violet ray machine, which was once a cure-all. Hundreds of thousands of them were manufactured here in Chicago. And in addition to that, some men were suffocated. Some were hung by handcuffs. Mock executions were conducted on others. Some were subjected to severe beatings.

And these four were able to file civil suits now, many years after the torture. The last man who was tortured, of the four, was tortured in 1987, so twenty years ago. And he’s only able to file, because of the pardoning by Governor Ryan. There are many men who served time and are out now who are not able to file, because of the time that has passed, and there are twenty-five men, approximately, who are still inside, whom nobody is paying much attention to, who are there on the basis of suspect confessions.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And there’s been no effort to reopen some of these convictions, based on the nature of the confessions that were obtained under torture?

JOHN CONROY: No. This is remarkable to me, but it’s Chicago, and there is a consistent pattern, same officers appearing in different cases, telling the same story that they didn’t do this thing that they’re accused of, men telling stories about having been tortured with these strange machines, one of which they cannot name, they cannot describe. They can describe it, rather, but they can’t name it, and—which gives the men a credibility, when they’re describing a machine that nobody—few people know it exists. And they’ve described it, but can’t name it.

Anyway, they have—there’s a lot of consistency to the reports, no effort to reopen their investigations—the investigations into their crimes. Now, some of these men are guilty. Many of the men who were tortured were guilty. Nonetheless, this isn’t a country where we have that standard of human rights, where we torture people into confessing to crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: The numbers, John Conroy, some—more than 135 people saying they had bags placed over their heads, guns forced into their mouths, electric shocks applied to their genitals. What has happened to Jon Burge since then, the police commander in charge?

JOHN CONROY: Well, in 1992, police board hearings began in the single case of Andrew Wilson, who had shot dead two police officers and emerged from the police station with very distinct marks on his ears and nose from alligator clips. And it was really an employment hearing; it was not a criminal hearing. And the police board decided, in a very vaguely worded decision, that Burge should no longer be on the force. At that point, he was fired, and he retired to Florida, where he lives today and collects his pension. Other than that, there has never been any criminal proceeding—

AMY GOODMAN: Collects his police pension?

JOHN CONROY: Yes. There has never been any criminal proceeding against any of the officers. And now, there is a glimmer of hope among those who had hoped to see something like that. Patrick Fitzgerald has announced that he—our US attorney here in the Northern District of Illinois—has announced that he is investigating the possible obstruction of justice and perjury committed not in the torture cases themselves, but in these civil suits. These officers testified that no torture had taken place, they didn’t know about any torture, they never heard about any torture. And it’s possible that they can be indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice now. But we have to wait and see.

The deadline for Fitzgerald is really November of this coming year. That’s the latest date by which he could possibly indict Jon Burge, because Burge took the Fifth Amendment for everything, except some written answers he gave in November of 2003 in the Madison Hobley civil suit, which is now trying to be settled.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, you’ve been covering this story for eighteen years. What was the initial reaction to your stories when you first started writing about this, and especially by the other commercial press in Chicago? And how does it feel, that long on a story, to get these kinds of results so long afterward?

JOHN CONROY: Well, the initial reaction was dead silence, really, on the part of the mainstream media, but the—interestingly, the internal investigative arm of the Police Department, the Office of Professional Standards, used this story to—as a starting point for their reopening of the investigation. And it was that—there were actually two investigators assigned, and each—one was assigned to review the Wilson case, and one was assigned to review the big picture at Area Two. And they concluded, separately, that torture had taken place, one, in the Wilson case and, two, that it was a pattern at Area Two and that the command officers had known about it.

So, many years—well, actually, in 1993 then, and as a result of those reports, there were police board hearings, which resulted in Burge being fired, but strangely, that was treated sort of as a one-day story: Burge was fired over torture. But nobody said, “Well, what about the victims?” And so, the next piece I did in 1996 pointed out that—it was called “Town Without Pity,” and it was really about the lack of public reaction to the fact that there were men on death row who were going to die if something wasn’t done about their cases.

So, fast-forward to today, four of the cases may wrap up with some kind of financial reward for these men, but it’s, you know, a drop in the bucket compared to what could have been paid and should be paid, really, in remuneration for the damage done to these men’s lives, not just those four men, but the more-than-hundred men who were tortured.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, John, you’ve been laid off?

JOHN CONROY: I was laid off last week. Four writers from the Reader were given the boot. We don’t fit into the future plans of the company which purchased the Chicago Reader last summer. The company is based in Florida.

AMY GOODMAN: What will you do now?

JOHN CONROY: I’m not sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, John Conroy, investigative journalist and author. He is author of the book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2007-12-11T11:33:00.001-08:00

Dear Friends

Fifty-nine years ago today the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The opening sentence of the Preamble of that document speaks a fundamental truth and timeless aspiration:

"(R)ecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."

We are getting closer to the day when the world recognizes that a state execution, the ritual killing of a human being by agents of a government, is a human rights violation, not a criminal sanction. I look forward to the time when International Human Rights Day is celebrated in a world where nations and people live without executions.

Below is the International Human Rights Day posting from "For Victims, Against the Death Penalty," MVFHR's blog. MVFHR's staff, board and members honor all who work daily for human dignity and for human rights, and to end capital punishment. And are grateful to all who, today and every day, support the work of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights.

In solidarity,

Renny Cushing
Renny Cushing, Executive Director
Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights
2161 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02140
617 491 9600 Office
617 930 5196 Mobile
www.mvfhr.org
www.mvfhr.blogspot.com/
rrcushing@earthlink.net
For Victims, Against the Death Penalty
The web log of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights

Monday, December 10, 2007
Happy Human Rights Day and Happy Birthday MVFHR
Today is International Human Rights Day and the third anniversary of the founding of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights. I'm remembering the ceremony at the United Nations Church Plaza on December 10, 2004, when several victims’ family members spoke powerfully and movingly about their reasons for working against the death penalty and several allies and friends saluted the new organization. All who were present signed a document pledging their commitment to working to end the death penalty.

It’s been a full and busy three years, during which we've been moved and energized and enraged and determined and so many other feelings that this work engenders. Now we're full of plans and hopes for the next three years, but today is a day to pause and thank everyone who makes MVFHR the powerful voice for victims and against the death penalty that it is. If we haven't heard from you in a while (or even if we have!), take a moment to drop us a line and let us know how you are and what you've been up to. (You can send email to sheffer@aceweb.com)

In celebration of Human Rights Day, here is an excerpt from Sister Helen Prejean’s book The Death of Innocents:

It was to be expected when Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was debated back in the 1940s that such a declaration, which granted everyone the right to life without qualification, would provoke debate, and one of the first proposed amendments was that an exception ought to be made in the case of criminals lawfully sentenced to death. Eleanor Roosevelt urged the committee to resist this amendment, arguing that their task was to draw up a truly universal charter of human rights toward which societies could strive. She foresaw a day when no government could kill its citizens for any reason.

And here is the U.S. Human Rights Network’s inspiring statement about the importance of focusing on human rights work in the United States:

Underlying all human rights work in the United States is a commitment to challenge the pernicious belief that the United States is inherently superior to other countries of the world, and that neither the U.S. government nor the U.S. rights movements have anything to gain from the domestic application of human rights. Rather, in the view of a growing number of U.S. activists, the U.S. government should no longer be allowed to shield itself from accountability to human rights norms.

Finally, here is a snippet of what Renny Cushing wrote in the first issue of MVFHR’s newsletter, Article 3:

In the human rights community, there is talk about how to integrate respect for universal human rights with recognition of the harm suffered by victims. There is talk of the need to hold accountable those who violate the human rights of others. How do we hold nations - or individuals - accountable? How do we respond to one violation of human rights without involving ourselves in another such violation? How can we apply an ethic of respect for people’s humanity consistently to those who have committed crimes and to those who have been victimized?
These questions drive our work at Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights and they will inform the stories we publish in Article 3. We decided to name this newsletter Article 3 knowing that a lot of people might at first wonder about its meaning. But this name - like our work in general - is an act of faith that people can be invited to look closer, to consider more deeply, to ente r into new ways of thinking. We believe people can come to see that the death penalty is a violation of basic human rights and that it is time for nations across the world to abolish it.

City to settle Burge case

2007-12-09T02:20:00.000-08:00

Jon Burge

4 alleged victims to get share of up to $19.8 million under tentative plan

By Gary Washburn and Jeff Coen Tribune staff reporters
December 8, 2007

Closing one major chapter in the long-running saga of disgraced former police Cmdr. Jon Burge, the city tentatively has agreed to pay as much as $19.8 million to settle the cases of four African-American men who allegedly were tortured into confessions while in his custody.

The total settlement, which is expected to be considered by the City Council next week, could exceed the $18 million paid to the family of LaTanya Haggerty, whom police mistakenly shot to death in 1999.In typical City Hall fashion, news of the big payout came late Friday afternoon, while Mayor Richard Daley was out of town and unavailable for comment. The mayor's in Italy, but the Daley administration insisted the timing was coincidental.

Aldermen who for months have been pressuring Daley to settle the torture cases welcomed the news.

"I am euphoric," said Ald. Ed Smith (28th). "We have been pushing for a long time."

Now, Smith said, officials must find a way to bring criminal charges against Burge and strip him of his city pension.

"These [victims] will have to live with what this man did to them for the rest of their lives, and he is living off the fat of the land."

Burge, who was fired by the city in 1993 and now lives in Florida, long has denied any wrongdoing. Nevertheless, in a deposition videotaped in 2004, he repeatedly invoked his 5th Amendment right against self incrimination.

The settlement would cover the high-profile cases of four men convicted of murder after allegedly being subjected to electric shocks, beatings and other brutality by Burge and officers in his command. Leroy Orange, Stanley Howard, Madison Hobley and Aaron Patterson all were pardoned and released from Death Row by then-Gov. George Ryan.

Plaintiffs' lawyers contended the city agreed to a $14.8 million settlement with Orange, Howard and Hobley last year and then backed out. But Daley insisted he never signed off on such a deal.

In September, Corporation Counsel Mara Georges disclosed why not: Hobley is under federal investigation for events surrounding the fatal 1987 fire that had led to his conviction.

Under a settlement very different from the others, Hobley is to receive an initial $1 million. Another $6.5 million will be paid only if he is not indicted and convicted for the alleged arson, which killed seven people.

Orange is to get $5.5 million, Patterson $5 million. Both will be responsible for paying their attorneys. Howard will get $800,000 from the city, his lawyers $1 million.

"I think it has reflected very badly on the city of Chicago not only that this took place but that it has been almost 20 years since we have known about it and we finally are moving to settle," said Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th). "It is possible that people who were tortured were guilty, but that is irrelevant. They shouldn't have been tortured."

Accuser back in prison

Four years after his release from prison, Patterson was convicted earlier this year of trading in guns and drugs. He was sentenced to 30 years and is serving time in a high-security federal prison in Kentucky, according to federal prison records.

But attorney Frank Avila Jr., who represented him in his suit against the city, said it is difficult to compute what Patterson is owed for the years spent behind bars unjustly after his abuse.

"How do you compensate a man who is imprisoned for 17 years for something he didn't do, and for 15 years on Death Row?" Avila said. "Money is the only analogous system, but how do you do it? Per day? Per week? Per hour? How do you compensate a man for being tortured?"

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd), a lawyer who won $9 million from the city for a client in an earlier wrongful conviction case, said the big money also is justified to help the men adjust to life outside prison.

"They are so downtrodden, they can't lift themselves up," Fioretti said.

The city's legal tab for outside attorneys in the four cases to date totals $6.6 million, said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for the city's Law Department. And police wrongdoing judgments and settlements cost the city a total of about $26.4 million last year; $20.6 million in 2005; $31.3 million in 2004; and $26.7 million in 2003.

In a still unresolved Burge-related case, convicted murderer Darrell Cannon is seeking to add to the $3,000 settlement he agreed to when he represented himself in a case against the city in 1986.

The city is "worried about the precedent it's going to set [to pay more now]," said G. Flint Taylor, the attorney who now represents Cannon. "Well, what kind of precedent is it going to set if they go to trial?"
Taylor contended the city faces $3 million in legal costs to fight the case. Hoyle disputed that amount, saying taxpayers have paid about $520,000 in legal fees thus far.

City defends timing

As for the timing of the announcement -- with Daley abroad -- Hoyle said the four settlements are "something we have been finalizing over the last few weeks" and finished only on Friday, in time for presentation to the council's Finance Committee on Monday.

On another police-related front, city officials are seeking the right to conduct drug and alcohol testing after all shootings involving officers as part of contract negotiations with the Fraternal Order of Police.

The Tribune reported this week that the Police Department in some cases has administered tests hours after shooting incidents in which there are indications of impairment and, in other cases, not at all.

After an eight-month investigation of police shootings, the newspaper highlighted the questionable fatal shooting of a would-be car thief by Officer Phyllis Clinkscales. Records and interviews indicated that no test was administered, though the off-duty Clinkscales was returning at 3 a.m. from a wedding reception held at a tavern.

An FOP official declined to comment on the city's contract proposal.

- - -

Legal costs

$7.2 million

Estimated amount that the City of Chicago and Cook County have spent on investigations and settlements related to the cases of Jon Burge and his associates.

$531,277

Cost (included in the total $7.2 million) for outside counsel for proceedings to fire Burge from the department.

$6.2 million

Cost to Cook County taxpayers for the special prosecutor's investigation and 292-page report.

City of Chicago, Special Prosecutor's Office

gwashburn@tribune.com

jcoen@tribune.com

Bill Moyers Talks with Thomas Cahill

2007-11-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11092007/watch2.html

Bill Moyers Talks with Thomas Cahill

BILL MOYERS: I'll introduce you now to someone I've long wanted you to know. He's steeped himself in thousands of years of history trying to figure out who we are in the 21st century.

His name is Thomas Cahill. Much of the year Thomas Cahill lives and works here in New York City where he was born to Irish-American parentsgraduated from Fordham University with degrees in classical literature and philosophyand went on to immerse himself in Hebrew and Greek, scripture and theology, film and drama.

In 1995 he published the first of a series of best-selling books on the "hinges of history." Pivotal moments and people in the rise of western culture: HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION, THE GIFT OF THE JEWS, DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS (The World Before And After Jesus), WHY THE GREEKS MATTER and his most recent, MYSTERIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

But right now Thomas Cahill has stepped out of the distant past and is writing a book about the death penalty. There are 3350 people on death row in America, and the debate over their fate is back in the news.

SISTER HELEN PREJEAN: People are not close, they're kept away from seeing it

BILL MOYERS: Last week, Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote the best-selling book DEAD MAN WALKING and filmmaker Mario Marazziti of Italy, presented the President of the General Assembly with five million signatures calling for an end to the death penalty. And Amnesty International urged the UN to pass a resolution for a moratorium on capital punishment declaring that it 'has never been shown to deter crime more effectively than other punishments.'

Not so, said this op-ed on the editorial page of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, arguing that 'capital punishment works.'

The American Bar Association has also called for a moratorium on capital punishment. And last Tuesday, just moments before a prisoner in Mississippi was scheduled to die by lethal injection the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 1099 people have been executed. Texas leads the waywith 405 — four times the nearest state.

One of those executed in Texas was Dominique Green — put to death three years ago by lethal injection.

NEWS ANCHOR: Inside the Walls Unit, the execution started. Outside, the victims son...

BILL MOYERS: It was a big story on local news.

NEWS ANCHOR: Green was executed after a last minute ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.

NEWS ANCHOR: When he was sentenced to death for robbing and killing a man in a Houston store.

BILL MOYERS: During his stay on death row Dominique Green had written a letter to a newspaper in Italy, asking for help. Because of Italy's opposition to the death penalty, the Roman Coliseum is lit up when a death sentence is commuted somewhere in the world or when a country abolishes capital punishment.

Across the Tiber River from the Coliseum is an international community of social justice known as Sant'Egidio, in the very neighborhood where Tom Cahill and his wife Susan live when they're not in New York. And that's how Cahill heard of Dominique Green.

Here in the states he arranged for his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to visit Green at the prison in Texas. They talked for two hours in private and Tutu then issued a plea in behalf of Green, calling the death penalty 'an absurdity that brutalizes society.' It didn't matter. Domninique Green was put to death at 7:59 p.m. On October 26, 2004.

Dominique Green is the subject of Thomas Cahill's next book. Cahill's work chronicling the roots of western civilization is a pageant of events and personalities. But right now he is absorbed with the story of one man's life and death. Welcome to THE JOURNAL.

BILL MOYERS: Tom Cahill, thanks for joining me on the JOURNAL.

THOMAS CAHILL: Bill, it's always a pleasure to be invited.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me, what was Dominique Green's story? Where did he come from and where did he wind up?

THOMAS CAHILL: He came from an alcoholic drug-using household. He was sexually abused several times. He was put in juvenile homes. He was-- just about everything that could be done to him that anyone could imagine being done to a child, was done to him. When it says in the Old Testament that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children into the third and fourth generation, I think that's correct, that these terrible things that go on in families go from one generation to another to another.

BILL MOYERS: So, what happened on the night that he wound up being accused of murder?

THOMAS CAHILL: They were robbing people in a number of different situations--

BILL MOYERS: He and a group of kids?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: And there are people in Texas who swear that Dominique Green pulled the trigger that killed the man for whom he was convicted of murdering.

THOMAS CAHILL: Right. But what actually happened was-- and it's in an instance of how badly this is done in Texas, there were four kids. One of them was white. He was not charged with anything. Ever. And you cannot interview him til this day.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

THOMAS CAHILL: You can't find him. But he exists. I know his name. And the other three were black. Dominique was the youngest. And the two others turned against him to get lighter sentences, it looks to me. And they decided that he would take the rap. He was certainly guilty of robbery. I don't think he was guilty of murder. But even if he was, I don't think that's not what I see in this. What I see in this is that we as a country are actually sacrificing children to an evil God, to the God of whatever this justice is that we-- instead of take-- instead of doing something for Dominique Green who grew up without the aid of civilization, we condemn him to death, and to the torture of 11 years on death row.

There was a trial. There was very bad representation. The judge that Dominique came up before was the same judge who in a slightly earlier appeal had been asked to reverse a decision because the lawyer who represented this kid in this earlier trial, had slept throughout the trial. And everyone had seen that and everyone knew about it. And the judge, in his decision, said, "The Constitution gives you the right to a lawyer. It doesn't say whether he has to be awake or not." So, I mean, this sort of-- there is, I think throughout the country but especially in the state of Texas, there is a kind of collusion among lawyers whether they're prosecutors or defenders, and judges, and an awful lot of horrible things happen in order to get as many people as possible executed.

BILL MOYERS: But there is the question of a crime and of justice as some people see it.

THOMAS CAHILL: The crime is secondary. Crime is secondary. There are no millionaires on death row nor will there ever be. Almost everyone on death row is poor. And do you really think that no millionaire ever committed a capital crime?

BILL MOYERS: So what are you saying?

THOMAS CAHILL: I'm saying that there are certain people in our society that we are willing to offer up. And not others. And they're the people who have no power. We're not killing Dominique Green because he committed murder. We're killing Dominique Green because we want to kill somebody.

BILL MOYERS: How do you deal with people who say what would Tom Cahill write if he were part of the family of someone who'd been killed by someone on death row?

THOMAS CAHILL: I understand very much the feeling of somebody who has lost a person through murder. I understand very much why they would not necessarily be willing to sign on to Texans Against the Death Penalty or any other such organization. But however difficult it may be the only way you are going to gain closure is to let go of your hatred. Holding on to it is never going to get you out of it. It's never going to get you out of the bind, the knot that you're in. I don't see how it can. The widow of Andrew Lastrapes, the man who was killed in the incident for which Dominique was executed said to me, "Of course, I forgive Dominique. And I forgive them all."

And I said, "How do you do that?" And she said, "Isn't that what we're supposed to do?" She's an extremely bright but simple woman. But she had no doubts about where her values lay. That doesn't mean that I would be able to say that if such a thing had just happened to me. I understand very much the rage, all right. I'm full of rages myself, you know.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain that most of the democratic world has given up capital punishment? You know, there's a new movement internationally to ban it.

THOMAS CAHILL: And that's true. Throughout Italy, when we-- though it doesn't happen here, you won't see the name in the New York Times, when we-- you may see it on a back page. But when we actually execute someone, it's front-page news throughout Italy.

BILL MOYERS: Why is that?

THOMAS CAHILL: They care deeply about-- because they consider it to be a terrible injustice that people are still being executed. You know, you cannot join the European Union as a country if you execute people

BILL MOYERS: Have you seen those photographs of the Iranian hoisting their targeted prisoners up on a crane while thousands of men and women shout, "God is great-- God is great." What does that mean?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, it wasn't all that long ago that we did things like that. Now we execute in private or, you know, out of the public square. But, it wasn't all that long ago that in the west, we were executing publicly and people would come. It was a big deal. They'd bring a picnic lunch and sit there with their children and watch some guy be strung up. I mean, how long ago was that?

BILL MOYERS: The Taliban do it. Al-Qaeda does it. The IRA in Ireland did it. Bin Laden says that chopping off heads is a justified form of punishment. And what does it say that violent death becomes a policy option? That in the name of life, we take life. What does that say to you?

THOMAS CAHILL: I think that there are many things within the human soul or within the human character that we ignore. There's a tendency to violence in all of us. There's even, I believe, a prehistoric desire for human sacrifice. We see it in all ancient cultures. I refer to it in how the Irish saved civilization. The Irish knew-- the Irish sacrificed children and-- victims of war and all that sort of stuff before Christianity came in. The Jews seemed to have been doing it in the time of Genesis when so many anthropologists believe that the aqedah — the near sacrifice of Isaac — is an example of the Jews finally rejecting human sacrifice.

BILL MOYERS: Is the death penalty important for historians looking at civilization as you have done? Does it tell you something that you wouldn't get anywhere else?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, getting rid of it is a very new phenomenon. You know, it wasn't very long ago that all civil-- all societies had the death penalty. So, it's a little early to say how important it's going to be. I mean, a historian really wants a few hundred years to elapse before he makes a statement about anything. But I think it will be important. I think it's among the touchstones-- right now of where different societies are going. The crueler societies, China, Saudi Arabia, the United States support the death penalty. The easier, more open, more generous societies, like Western Europe do not.

BILL MOYERS: And yet that's the continent that was ravaged by one war after another for so long.

THOMAS CAHILL: They finally learned something. I really do believe that that — thanks especially to what happened in the First and Second World Wars in which they behaved abominably they learned that it was time not to do that anymore. And that's basically what at the end of the 17th century the original Anabaptists were doing. The people who became the Quakers and the--

BILL MOYERS: Mennonites--

THOMAS CAHILL: Mennonites--

BILL MOYERS: And the Amish and all of those.

THOMAS CAHILL: You know? They were saying, "No, no, this is--" they were the first people against capital punishment. They were the very first people to oppose it and to try to reform prisons so that they would not simply be places where people were punished. They were to be put in penitentiaries. Places where people could repent.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Penitence was to--

THOMAS CAHILL: Yeah!

BILL MOYERS: ...happen there. As you say happened in the case-- you really believe it happened in the case of Dominique Green.

THOMAS CAHILL: Oh, yeah, yeah. Very much.

THOMAS CAHILL: I mean, a man who goes up and down death row and gets everybody to forgive and be forgiven is not a-- is not somebody we have to be afraid of.

BILL MOYERS: Dominique Green requested that he be cremated and that the ashes placed in that marvelous church Santa Maria Church in the district of Rome, where you and your wife have a second home. Did that happen?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yes, he could not be buried within the Basilica of Santa Maria, itself, because of laws against interment within those churches that are secular laws of the Italian state. But, he has been interred in a beautiful anteroom within the Piazza of Santa Maria. That's where he is. He wanted to be taken out of Livingston. And well, he actually would have been buried not in Livingston. But in Huntsville. The death row is in Livingston. But, the night before their executions, they are brought to Huntsville. And there's an enormous burial ground there. It goes on for miles.

BILL MOYERS: We were in Rome in the spring. We were in your neighborhood. But we also went over to the Coliseum where the lions used to tear the gladiators to shreds. And you can't help but think about how this cockpit of cruelty has become one of the world's great tourist attractions. Now, what does that say to you?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yeah, well, it says something that we don't, again, want to look at. But-- you know, it is the single largest monument to human cruelty in the world, the Coliseum. Now the Coliseum is on the list of the seven wonders of the world, the new seven wonders.

BILL MOYERS: What is it? Help me understand that psychology.

THOMAS CAHILL: Why have there been so many movies about Romans sitting in the Coliseum going like that? We get a kick out of it. The real evil in the world, it seems to me, is cruelty. That's-- to me the word evil equals cruelty. It's human cruelty that is evil. And you-- we all have to deal with that. We all have a tendency to that that we're not willing — we're not willing to acknowledge that this is inside of us. It's there.

BILL MOYERS: You write in the beginning of Desire of the Everlasting Hills, quote, "The history of the world, like the history of its hills is written in blood, has there ever been any period when that wasn't so that you've studied?

THOMAS CAHILL: There are times, I think, when that does happen. There are-- it's hard to find in Greco-Roman civilization. But you find it, for instance, in the communities set up by Francis of Assisi. You find it in among the Quakers. Now none of those people have been able to transform whole societies. But they did create a moment-- what I would think of as a Shangri-La moment.

BILL MOYERS: What's their characteristic? What do they share in common?

THOMAS CAHILL: People who were able to, I think, recognize what human cruelty is about and renounce it. It doesn't really matter whether they said explicitly, "I renounce human cruelty." What was was important is that they begin to treat one another-- Francis of Assisi said that the best thing you can do to any other person is to say to him or her, "May the lord give you peace. And that's how we should go about our business. May the lord give you peace." Well, that all-- that already puts you in a completely different mindset it seems to me. And he said, "You do that with everybody." You know, it doesn't matter whether he's a leper or a heretic or a Muslim. May the lord give you peace.

BILL MOYERS: You've studied history enough to know what works for the individual in a small realm of relationship isn't a rule that the nation state can live by is it?

THOMAS CAHILL: I don't think that real civilization ever occurs because of anything that a nation state does. It occurs because of movements within the nation state that are led by sometimes one individual or a series of individuals. Desmond Tutu is an excellent example of that. And in fact, I'll tell you something I've never told anybody before. In each of the books that I've written, I-- when I come upon a great historical figure that I'm trying to deal with I try to think of someone I know who is like that person. And my model for Saint Patrick is Desmond Tutu. Which I think he would be surprised to hear too, but Tutu in South Africa and his wife, who should not be forgotten Leah Tutu and their children, their four children, they live-- the whole time those children were growing up, 25, 30 years, they were under-- they were in danger of being assassinated. The entire time those six people were in danger of death by hatred.

Nelson Mandela is always credited with so much. And I don't mean to take anything away from him. But he was in prison for 27 of those years. He he wasn't on the scene. It was Tutu who was on the scene. It was Tutu who would say-- who would stand up to these horrible South African guards and say, "You don't know what you're talking about. Our God is a God of resurrection. You're not going to do us in." This little guy is five feet four standing up to all the forces of-- that really have-- of cruelty and evil.

BILL MOYERS: So, it's the individual who acts--

THOMAS CAHILL: And his wife and his children--

BILL MOYERS: Well, they--

THOMAS CAHILL: --and Steven Biko and all the different people that were part-- it isn't just one man.

BILL MOYERS: I'm still wrestling with this abrupt change in your subject matter. I mean, isn't the story of Dominique Green, one individual executed for a crime way off your beaten path?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yes, it is different from what I've been doing for sure. But I don't think that ...well, why am I doing the Hinges of History? What I'm really interested in is what makes for civilization and what does not. So, the people that I'm looking for in the series asks the question, how did we become the people that we are? And why do we think the way we do and feel the way we do and perceive the way we do?

But underneath that, what I'm really interested in, is what's good about us. What do we do that's good? I started with HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION which is not the beginning of western history by any means for a reason. It was the simplest book-- simplest story that I had to tell. And it was about this guy named Patrick who had been a Roman citizen on the Island of Britain who was kidnapped at the age of 16 and taken to Ireland and made into a slave for six years after which he escaped. Then in middle age he returned to Ireland which was a rough, rough place, not a place anybody would willingly return to. And he came back, at that point, with the gospels. And he became the evangelist of the Irish.

And what he did in doing that which was a great act of generosity because he spent the last 30 years of his life in Ireland-- among these very crazy people who practiced human sacrifice, who had no problem with slavery in its most awful form, who believed in really dark gods. This was quite a group to come and be-- decide to spend your life with willingly. In that great act of generosity he also realized that though he was never going to make them Romans or Athenians, he had to teach them to read and write.

And so he taught them to read and write from these simple little lives of the saints of the period which are really lives of the martyrs. It was the early Roman martyrs. And it was all the terrible things that the Romans had done to the early Christians, you know. They were eaten by lions. They had their eyes plucked out. They had-- you know, they were slowly eviscerated. They were all these different things that had been done to them. Saint Lawrence was burned on a griddle, you know, on one side and then on the other side, all that kind of stuff.

The Irish loved these stories. They thought they were dandy. And the only thing that made them sad was that Christianity came into Ireland without any martyrs. Because the Irish just kind of rolled over and accepted it and said, "Yeah, well this really does...this makes more sense than what we were doing." It was so much more-- it was so superior. But what Patrick also did in teaching them to read and write was they ended up setting themselves the task in the sixth, seventh and eighth century of copying out all of western literature, the whole of the western library which was in danger of extinction at that time because the Germanic barbarians had invaded the Roman Empire and within a century almost no one could read or write. Literacy itself was gone.

BILL MOYERS: So, civilization can be taken away.

THOMAS CAHILL: If there are no books there's no civilization. That's for sure. And that of course, the Germanic barbarians thought that the only thing books were good for was as kindling. They had no other use for it. So, at this period you have these very simple people who had been great warriors and crazy kidnappers and all that sort of stuff sitting down and deciding what they would do is copy out Plato, which, of course, they couldn't understand. But they thought it was important. And they had learned the alphabet. And damn it they were going to do this. It was difficult. And that was one thing that the Irish did like. They liked things that were difficult.

So, they copied out all of Latin and Greek literature. And they added to it in the margins. Because they couldn't understand the Plato very well. And it was kind of hard for the scribe to copy page after page of Plato without understanding it very well. He started doodling in the margins. And that's the beginning of the great books like the Book of Kells, the great decorated books. And you have all these funny little medieval people peeping through in the margins. And then he would sometimes put in little comments or jokes or a little poem that had been part of the repertoire of the wandering bards. And so, that Irish becomes the first vernacular literature to be copied out and written down.

BILL MOYERS: You start that book on the Irish with a chapter on the fall of Rome. What do you think about these analogies between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fall of America? Do you think there's anything to that from your wide sweep of studying history?

THOMAS CAHILL: I would say in some ways yes and in some ways no. You know, there's-- history never repeats itself. That's one thing you can say about it. It never happens again exactly the same way. So, there are tremendous differences. But we can look into the past and learn things. I think, for instance, why did Rome fall? Because of things interior and exterior. The interior part was less and less just taxation. More and more it was the poor and the middle class that bore the burden of taxation. And the wealthy and very wealthy pretended to pay but didn't actually.

And I think we are in a very similar situation with regard to that. Then the other thing was-- the external thing was that you had all of these Germanic barbarians who we think of as marauders and all that. They just wanted in. They were on the wrong side of the river. And they knew it. They wanted to have farms and vineyards like the Romans had. They thought it looked great. They wanted to cross the river. You know, what they were? They were immigrants. That's who they were not at all unlike the situation today at the borders of our country and the borders of Europe.

THOMAS CAHILL: And what happened was despite the unjust taxation or despite-- taxation in any form, the Romans could not pay to keep them out. No matter what they did they couldn't make that border guard and those walls high enough and strong enough to keep out the barbarians. If people really want to get in they're going to find a way in.

BILL MOYERS: How did Christians learn tolerance over time?

THOMAS CAHILL: I think it all has to do with Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries where both sides, both Protestants and Catholics, eliminated one another to their heart's content. I mean, they couldn't have been-- they liked nothing better than a bonfire and putting somebody in the middle of it. And that was happening on both sides. You know, the-- as somebody said at one point, in Papal Rome, there were more heads on the bridge that led out of the Vatican than there were melons in the market. And that was-- but you could have said that about Geneva. You could have said that about London. You could have gone on and on with all of them.

What finally happened with people like Voltaire who were-- at least expressly sort of outside religious circles, they began to say, "Do we really have to keep doing this? Do we really-- is this the only way? You know-- does the religion of the monarch have to be the religion of all his subjects? Is that really necessary?" And the answer they gave was no. And you begin to have enlightened monarchs who say no. You know, we're going to get rid of a few of these disabilities here, you know. But that's the beginning of steps being taken in a new direction until you get the United States of America, the first country on earth in which the-- the-- that is built on tolerance. It starts with tolerance.

BILL MOYERS: Well, unless you were an indigenous American or--

THOMAS CAHILL: You bet.

BILL MOYERS: --Native American or a slave-- or an African brought over-- four million-- several million --

THOMAS CAHILL: Or unless you were even, you know, late 19th century Irish immigrant. So, there are plenty of exceptions. Plenty of things were-- plenty of times where it doesn't work. And yet it's a new idea.

BILL MOYERS: You once said that Christianity's dark history of crusades, inquisitions and pogroms lies not as far in the past as we might prefer to think. Because, going back to the Constitution, you said a country's finally emerged, our own, that officially refused to play the old game of whose religion was true. That America fostered a generously agnostic view of religious truth. You may believe what you like, Tom Cahill. And I may believe as I want. And we don't impose our beliefs on each other. Is that changing?

THOMAS CAHILL: It may be changing somewhat in the face of militant Islam. I think we are going to have to find a way of dealing with Islam that is better than the way that we have constructed so far.

BILL MOYERS: And they with us.

THOMAS CAHILL: Absolutely, absolutely, but we already have gone through that process. It was called the Enlightenment. And the result of the Enlightenment was the American Constitution. We-- that was the process by which we said, "Do we really have to keep killing one another?" No, now the Muslims have not gone through that. And the Sunnis and the Shiites still think that they have to keep killing one another. And God knows that the Wahabis and any number of other sects have-- you know, hate one another with far greater ferocity than they hate us.

Religious history shows you over and over again that you hate most of all the people that are closest to you but just a little bit different. Protestants and Catholics throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, you know, if you were a Martian coming you would have said, "Well, what are they arguing about? What-- they seem to believe the same things more or less. What's the problem here? Why do millions of people have to die?"

You know and as Jonathan Swift said, it was really about how you set an egg on the table, you know, with how you got at the meat of the egg. You know-- some people did it one way and some people did it another. And that was enough reason to kill. And it more or less does come down to that. You know, I mean, there's still plenty of people who feel that way. But we have essentially gotten beyond that. It would be a dreadful tragedy if we fell back into that.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that what's going on now between the Shiites and the Sunnis in Iraq is comparable to what went on between the Catholics and the Protestants in 16th century--

THOMAS CAHILL: It's so parallel it's amazing.

BILL MOYERS: In what sense?

THOMAS CAHILL: Because from our point of view, not being Muslims, we look at them. And we say, "What are they arguing about? What's the big difference between--" you know, well, I can tell you what some of the differences are. And you would begin to lose interest. Anyone would if they weren't Muslim. And the same thing about the differences between Catholics and Protestants. I remember once giving a talk in a church. And a guy stood up and said "Do you believe we are saved by faith alone?" And I said, "Well, I believe we're saved by faith. But I believe with Paul the apostle that we're saved by faith, hope and charity and the greatest of these is love or charity." And he walked out. And he's not going to pay attention -And once I gave the wrong answer-- he was leaving. And he wanted me to know that he-- I had nothing more to say to him.

BILL MOYERS: -- suppose Thomas Cahill is incarnated 1,000 years from now and decides to pick up writing The Hinges of History. What would be the, as of now, the defining characteristic of the American society you would write about in the 20th and 21st century?

THOMAS CAHILL: That all societies have a dream and a nightmare. And our nightmare has been, I think, our racism. We practically committed genocide on the people who were here, the Native Americans. We enslaved another race of people, the Africans. And then we dropped the atom bomb on Asians. We would have never dropped that bomb in Europe in my view. And I think that's what proves the racism of it. That's the nightmare of America.

The dream of America is enunciated by the great speech by Martin Luther King I Have a Dream. The dream is that there is no country on earth that has tried to actually embrace all the people that we have tried to embrace. All you have to do is walk through New York City to see that or any of our cities and not a few of our country sides at this point. We could be called the most racist. Or we could be called the least. We are both. And it always remains a tension and a question as to which side of us, the good side or the bad side, will win out in the end. And I think that's true for every society.

BILL MOYERS: Let me come back to Dominique Green's storyDid you find Dominique Green to have turned that prison cell and death row into a zone of peace?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, you see in somebody's body and their face and their eyes, in the way they move what they're about. This was somebody who was deeply at peace with himself. Who was perfectly happy to go out toward another person and be in communication, who embraced you with his language if not with his body since he couldn't get through the glass partition.

BILL MOYERS: You've got to help me understand that. Because I'm imagining you seeing him through that glass partition. This is a man everybody down there thinks has killed another man. And something communicates itself to you through that glass partition.

BILL MOYERS: So, what struck you?

THOMAS CAHILL: Instead of talking about himself and --what the poor conditions he had to live in and all the things that I already knew about, he wanted desperately to talk about books and writing. And he had become a great reader in the 11 years that he had been in prison. The book that he had read most recently that he really cared deeply about was Desmond Tutu's book NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS, which is Archbishop Tutu's book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what also came out was that even though they're all in solitary confinement and you would think they can't communicate with one another, they manage. Because human beings are incredibly resourceful in situations like this. And Dominique was able to send that book after he had read it, up and down that death row.

BILL MOYERS: Tutu's book?

THOMAS CAHILL: Yeah. And most of the inmates on death row agreed that they had to forgive all the people who had hurt them and ask for forgiveness from all the people that they had hurt if they could, insofar as they could. So, there was this tremendous-- I think you'd have to call it a conversion. That's certainly what it sounds like to me, all these guys on death row that nobody cares about and everybody wants to execute offering forgiveness and asking forgiveness on the basis of a book.

BILL MOYERS: How did that play out practically? I mean, did Dominique Green ever get to communicate that to the families of the victim in that crime?

THOMAS CAHILL: Well, the victim was a man named Andrew Lastrapes, who was I think he was still in his 30s when it happened. And he had two small children — two sons — who became intimate friends of Dominique in his last days. Dominique, of course, you don't have an awful lot of things to give away on death row. Dominique gave Tutu's book to one of the sons of Andrew Lastrapes. And the other son received a rosary that Dominique kept around his neck. And each bead on that rosary was a reminder of one of the people on death row who had been executed before Dominique and who had helped Dominique to become the person he became.

BILL MOYERS: But he was a different man after 11 years from--

THOMAS CAHILL: Well--

BILL MOYERS: --the 19-year-old who was arrested for the killing, right? THOMAS CAHILL You know that was his -- That cell in that prison became the means of his transformation.

BILL MOYERS: Thomas Cahill, thank you for joining me on THE JOURNAL.

THOMAS CAHILL: Thank you, Bill.

Fighting for his legacy

2007-11-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

Fighting for his legacy

http://www.stltoday.com:80/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/illinoisnews/story/9E8B429702CF70B68625738F000C056A?OpenDocument

By Kevin McDermott

POST-DISPATCH SPRINGFIELD BUREAU

11/11/2007

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan walks out his house in Kankakee, Ill., with friends and relatives to speak with reporters.
(Jerry Lai/AP)

OXFORD, Wis. — A day after defiantly proclaiming his innocence, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan's final act as a free man last week was to switch cars en route from Chicago to Wisconsin, then slip in the back way to a federal prison here — thus avoiding a gauntlet of television cameras that waited to record his arrival.

The maneuver left some wondering why he would bother with such stealth at this point. Ryan stands convicted of fleecing his state while holding its highest office. He will probably be in prison until he's at least 79 years old. His political career is, without question, over.

What's a few more unflattering pictures?

The answer may have to do with a subject that clearly has been central in Ryan's mind since long before he was convicted last year: legacy.

"You don't run for elective office if you don't have a significant ego … (and) legacy is important from the standpoint of ego satisfaction," said Mike Lawrence, a former top aide to ex-Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar. "All of them want to be remembered for what they accomplished in public office.

"A picture of a governor going to prison is a lasting impression," added Lawrence, who now heads the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. "It overshadows other things people might remember."

Ryan today is viewed by many of his fellow Illinoisans as a crook who cashed in on his influence from the governor's office. But outside his home state, many see him as a heroic opponent of the death penalty. He has long made it obvious that he cares deeply about which of those two versions of his life gets top billing in the history books.

Even as federal prosecutors were circling at the end of his term as governor, Ryan used his final days in office, in January 2003, to commute the sentence of every inmate on Illinois' death row, making headlines around the world.

By 2005 — as a federal jury was being assembled in Chicago to consider charges that Ryan sold government influence to friends and cronies in exchange for gifts, trips and cash — death-penalty opponents were submitting Ryan's name to officials in Norway seeking to have him considered for the Nobel Peace Prize for his continuing anti-death-penalty work.

Ryan's supporters say his Illinois death penalty moratorium, which still stands, spurred unprecedented national soul-searching about the death penalty, and even paved the way for the U.S. Supreme Court's current review of the constitutionality of lethal injections.

SLIDESHOW

Reflection on the career of former Gov. George Ryan

"When you add it all up, it was George Ryan who really opened up this entire debate about the death penalty in America," said Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is once again submitting Ryan's name for a Nobel Prize. "He's a visionary … but obviously, a lot of the media in this state don't see it that way."

Law professor Andrea Lyon of DePaul University in Chicago was so supportive of Ryan's work against capital punishment that she ended up working with the defense in his corruption trial last year.

"Did he play the political game the way it's played? Yes. Is that always seemly? No," Lyon acknowledged last week.

Even so, and even given the fact that Ryan on Wednesday successfully avoided having his arrival at prison recorded for posterity, his legacy may still be doomed.

"If history is a guide," said Lawrence, "Ryan will be will be remembered as a corrupt politician."

That's the lesson in looking back on figures like Richard Nixon, who opened China to the west but is mostly remembered today for resigning the presidency in disgrace. Or 1960s Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, whose groundbreaking national work in race relations was overshadowed by his later conviction for taking bribes while in office.

All indications are that Ryan's successor, too, is thinking about the issue of legacy — and, perhaps, looking at last week's events as a cautionary tale.

Like Ryan and his anti-death-penalty crusade, current Gov. Rod Blagojevich has displayed obsession with a potentially historic policy issue (universal health care). And, like Ryan, Blagojevich has seen the public's attention distracted from his official accomplishments because of federal investigators poking around.

Blagojevich friend and fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko has been indicted for allegedly offering to trade state business for campaign contributions to Blagojevich. Federal prosecutors have confirmed they're investigating alleged hiring fraud within the administration, and the feds also reportedly have subpoenaed records from Blagojevich's campaign fund.

Blagojevich has argued that the alleged crimes were isolated incidents by people acting on their own, and not indicative of a wider criminal pall over his administration.

But Ryan, in his last public appearance before becoming inmate No. 16627-424 at the Federal Correctional Institution at Oxford, Wis., appeared less concerned with the 6 1/2 year prison sentence ahead of him than with the image of himself he was leaving behind.

"To the people of Illinois, I'm not blind to the sentiment that some hold," Ryan told reporters Tuesday night outside his Kankakee home, a much better backdrop, legacy-wise, than the minimum-security prison he would virtually sneak into the next day. "But I want you to know that I did my best."

kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com | 217-782-4912

Bye, George

2007-11-08T09:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.suntimes.com:80/news/sneed/638160,CST-NWS-sneed07.article

Bye, George

November 7, 2007

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist

"I'm ready to go," said former Gov. George Ryan, who planned to caravan with his family to the federal prison in Oxford, Wis., today.

"Look, I'm fine. It's the beginning of a journey I hadn't expected, but it isn't over," Ryan told Sneed in an exclusive interview Monday night.

» Click to enlarge image

Surrounded by family and friends Tuesday night, former Gov. George Ryan proclaims his innocence: “I will report to the federal corrections facility in Oxford, Wisconsin, as ordered . . . but I do so with a clear conscience.”
(AP)

PHOTO GALLERY

• The Ryan Legacy

2 sides to Gov. Ryan

2007-10-30T00:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.suntimes.com/news/mcnamee/624955,CST-NWS-mcnamee29.article

2 sides to Gov. Ryan

THE CHICAGO WAY | Why is it so hard to believe he was both sincere about the
death penalty and a crook?

October 29, 2007
BY TOM McNAMEE Sun-Times Columnist

I asked an editor in the Sun-Times newsroom, a guy I respect: What do you
make of George Ryan's moratorium on executions?

"A cynical public relations stunt," he said.

There you go. You hear that a lot.

>From the moment former Gov. Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in
>Illinois, shortly before he left office in 2002, hard-eyed realists across
>the state had laughed off any possibility that his motives were pure, that
>he acted sincerely out of a troubled conscience.

Ryan's conscience wasn't troubled, they said. But Ryan, himself, was in deep
trouble, soon to be indicted for a string of crooked dealings while he was
governor and secretary of state. He seized on the death penalty issue, they
said, in a shameless attempt to divert attention from his legal problems,
and, perhaps, in a bid to salvage his legacy.

To which I've always replied: How boring.

People -- even a by-the-numbers Republican like Ryan -- are so much more
complicated than that.

My own belief is that Ryan was and remains utterly sincere in his opposition
to the death penalty. But whether he knows it or not, he never would have
done the soul-searching to get to that point, or felt the freedom to do
something about it, had U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald not been chasing
him down.
Unseen forces shape us

Why do any of us believe what we believe? It's almost never just a matter of
obvious self-interest.

"There are always analysts who come up with a primitive kind of Marxism, who
say that all we do is governed by rationally calculated self-interest," said
Andreas Glaeser, an associate professor of sociology at the University of
Chicago. "But I find that too primitive. I suspect your hunch is right about
somebody like Ryan. I have met politicians, and I was shocked to see the
human being in front of me."

>From his study of the secret police in formerly communist Eastern European
>countries, Glaeser said, he's found that the beliefs people claim to hold
>are heavily shaped by forces they don't even see.

"You have to look at their social networks," he said. "Their social
contracts, experiences in their jobs, who talks to whom, and what can you
talk about when you talk."

And when those unseen forces shift, so do our supposedly deepest
convictions.

In the case of Ryan, almost everything in his life and career would have
discouraged him from questioning the death penalty -- even to himself --
until he became governor. As a Kankakee Republican, he moved almost
exclusively in circles where a belief in the death penalty was a given, and
where expressing doubts was political suicide.

But as governor, it became Ryan's job to personally review the last-minute
appeals of prisoners about to be executed, and by all accounts the job
weighed heavily.

"It was gut-wrenching for him," recalled his former press secretary Dennis
Culloton. "He was emotionally wrought."

And then in late 1999, Culloton said, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of
articles about former Death Row inmates who had been wrongly convicted on
the basis of bad evidence, bad witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct -- and
it pushed Ryan over the edge. What if one of those wrongly convicted men,
Ryan asked, had been executed on his watch?

It was during a back-office meeting with aides, Culloton recalled, that Ryan
first entertained the idea of declaring a moratorium on executions. He began
the meeting by repeatedly asking, "What do I do? What do I do?"

"Nowhere was there talk of the political calculation," Culloton said. "Not
once did he say something like, 'Will this get me off the front page of the
scandal sheets?' "
Also agonized over abortion

Do I believe Culloton's spin? Yeah. Because this isn't the first time I've
heard about Ryan struggling to reconcile his politics and his personal
morality.

When Ryan was running for governor, as Chicago-based journalist Jim Merriner
reported in the Sun-Times in April, he also agonized over his stand on
abortion. While Ryan was officially opposed to abortion except in cases of
rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, he secretly harbored doubts.

One day during the campaign, he met with a woman who had aborted a fetus
that had no brain. The woman then had gotten pregnant again and given birth
to a healthy boy, whom she had brought along to her meeting with Ryan.

Ryan, according to Merriner, listened to the woman's story and looked at her
baby and started crying. He turned to an aide, Scott Fawell, and said,
"Scott, I'm pro choice."

"No, you're not!" Fawell said.

"Yes, I am!"

And so on.

Ryan remained opposed to abortion, but pro-life activists never fully
trusted him.
'I can see now'

Ryan's harshest critics say he declared the moratorium and commuted the
sentences of Death Row inmates for bald political gains. But at that time,
it's probably fairer to say, nobody really knew what the political fallout
would be.

"The rather divided reaction of Illinoisans about his commutations was a
shock to most observers who had expected a firestorm of protests," said the
novelist and lawyer Scott Turow, who served on a panel that studied the
state's death penalty procedures. "He did what he did, in my judgment,
knowing that he might leave office loathed and face a jury as a complete
pariah. His actions on the death penalty throughout were dispassionate and
courageous."

Courageous, yes. Dispassionate, not completely.

Ryan's own legal problems, during which he came to see himself as a victim
of an overzealous prosecutor in a rigged system of justice, undoubtedly
caused him to feel greater compassion for wrongly accused men and women
everywhere -- even on Death Row.

I am told that he has said to friends: "I can see how this happens."
Still guilty

By now, you must be thinking I'm the world's biggest George Ryan fan, so let
me be clear:

I think Ryan is guilty. Overwhelmingly.

I think Ryan is a shabby old-school pol who sold out the whole state,
sparing only his leeching pals.

And I think Ryan should go to prison as scheduled Nov. 7 -- no more delays.

But I also know it's possible for a man to fly high and fall low at the same
time.

That, as Shakespeare said, is the human condition.

And before going off to prison, George Ryan should have won the Nobel Peace
Prize.

Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" column runs Mondays.

Ryan: 'I still believe'

2007-08-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

Ryan: 'I still believe'

August 22, 2007

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist

'We are staying strong," former Gov. George Ryan told Sneed shortly after learning his conviction on corruption charges had been upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit.

"We have a large and strong family, and we all understand what is happening," Ryan added. "Faith is a big part of our life and it continues to be now. And I also have a lot of faith in my counsel."

Ryan and his extended family stayed behind closed doors Tuesday at his home in Kankakee, which was surrounded by the news media, as they wondered whether the ex-Illinois governor would have to report to federal prison by Friday morning.

» Click to enlarge image

Three judges agreed former Gov. George Ryan could remain free until the full court takes up the matter.
(Scott Stewart/Sun-Times file)

CAST YOUR VOTE

• George Ryan loses appeal, but remains free

'Chicago Tribune' Comes Out Against Death Penalty -- And Few Protest

2007-04-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

ILLINOIS:

'Chicago Tribune' Comes Out Against Death Penalty -- And Few Protest

For several years now, the Chicago Tribune has published numerous articles
-- many of them award-winning -- exposing the many faults in the
administration of capital punishment in its home state and the nation.
Some of them helped inspire a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois.

All the while, the paper's editorial page continued to support capital
punishment. That changed 3 weeks ago with an editorial opposing the death
penalty. Relatively few newspapers have gone that far and public opinion
continues to back capital punishment -- although support drops when people
are given the option of "life without parole."

Today, the Tribune's public editor, Timothy McNulty, reports that his
paper's surprise editorial has drawn surprisingly little black from
readers. Here is the 1st part of his column.

**

Individuals change their minds often, but a change of mind for a
newspaper's editorial position, especially one that has stood since at
least 1869, is far less common.

When the Tribune's editorial board came out in opposition to the death
penalty three weeks ago, the newspaper might have expected a rise out of
readers and politicians previously aligned with traditional thinking that
favored capital punishment.

"The evidence of recent years argues that it is necessary to curb the
government's power," the editorial declared, overturning its previous
arguments. "It is time to abolish the death penalty."

There was barely a ripple, a few heartfelt letters to the editor, a few
calls, and almost all accepting and welcoming the new attitude.

Abolition of the death penalty isn't on the political radar at the moment,
and if any readers were surprised, they may have assumed the newspaper
already opposed the death penalty. 8 years ago, reporters Maurice Possley,
Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong began detailing the abuses, and their
reporting led then-Gov. George Ryan to impose a death-penalty moratorium
in 2000. Gov. Rod Blagojevich has maintained it since.

Tribune writers continue to lead on national stories about death-penalty
abuses. Cornelia Grumman, an editorial writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for
her series of editorials on the injustice of the death penalty.

While here and in other states the same arguments are put forward by both
sides of the debate, the Tribune's editorial board looked at them afresh,
but also with the overwhelming evidence that the death penalty is not
applied fairly and is too open to mistakes that cost innocent lives.

(source: Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor. He is
co-author, with Robert Jay Lifton, of the book about capital punishment,
"Who Owns Death?", publihsed in 2000)

The Nobel Prize . . .

2007-04-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

Michael Sneed

The Nobel Prize . . .

April 1, 2007

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist

Sneed hears the Nobel Prize nomination of former Gov. George Ryan for his opposition to the death penalty has been accepted by the Nobel committee -- which has narrowed its list of thousands of nominees to 181.

It is the fifth time Ryan, who is still awaiting the outcome of his appeal for a mistrial, has been nominated by University of Illinois law Professor Francis Boyle.

Pssst!

Word is fedejral indictments against two top Illinois political players are this/close to hitting the headlines.

Death penalty moratorium takes political courage

2007-03-01T11:28:00.000-08:00

March 1, 2007

Death penalty moratorium takes political courage

By Michael Tackett, Post Bulletin

WASHINGTON -- While Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were engaged in
the first official hissy fit (the technical term) of the 2008 presidential
campaign, another Democrat was actually engaged in a matter of important
public policy.

Just to recap: Clinton was furious because Hollywood mogul David Geffen
ridiculed her and former President Bill Clinton in an interview with Maureen
Dowd of The New York Times on the very day that Geffen was hosting a
fundraiser for Obama that reportedly brought $1.3 million to his campaign.
Before his conversion to Obama, Geffen had raised about $18 million for the
former president.

The spat led to several days of coverage in a not-so-deep search for deeper
meaning about the state of the race and the state of the Clintons, which, by
the way, undoubtedly will be the campaign's ongoing soap opera subtext.

Meanwhile, across the country in Annapolis, Md., another public drama was
playing out, and in this case, the stakes were not money, but life and
death.

Martin O'Malley, the youthful new governor, made an emotional plea to a
state Senate committee to repeal the death penalty in Maryland.

That is one long march from the scene at a 1988 presidential debate when
Michael Dukakis was pilloried for giving a lawyerly answer to a hypothetical
question about whether he would impose the death penalty on a man who had
raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis' dispassionate rejection of capital
punishment became a ready emblem for the Republican narrative that Democrats
were soft on crime.

From that point on, most Democrats with higher ambitions rushed to be seen
as state-sanctioned Grim Reapers. None did it with as much flourish as
then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who jetted back to his state just before
the New Hampshire primary to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector,
a brain-damaged man who told prison officials he wanted to save the dessert
from his last meal until after his execution.

Few Democrats since have been willing to take forceful public action that
would make it appear as if they were not tough on criminals. In fact, it was
not until a Republican, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, imposed a
moratorium on the death penalty that any movement to repeal capital
punishment statutes gained significant traction. In fact, O'Malley cited
during his testimony the 18 Death Row inmates who have been released in
Illinois after their innocence was proved.

O'Malley has been on the short list of rising Democratic stars for several
years. Telegenic, smart and the leader of his own Irish band, O'Malley's
March, he was mayor of Baltimore before being elected governor last
November. Before that, he had been chosen to speak at the Democratic
National Convention in 2004 and fortunately for him, in a very forgettable
time slot, given a delivery that dripped with emotion far more than
sincerity.

His push to repeal the death penalty is perhaps his highest-profile move
since taking office, and one that carries abundant political risk,
particularly because he is seen as a politician with national ambitions.

But on this issue, O'Malley is resolutely righteous, making a moral and
theological argument as much as a political or legal one to support his
thesis that the death penalty is neither a "just punishment" nor an
"effective deterrent" to murder.

"Notwithstanding the executions of the rightly convicted, can the death
penalty ever be justified, then, as public policy when it inherently
necessitates the occasional taking of a wrongly convicted and innocent
life?" he said. "Is any one of us willing to sacrifice a member of our own
family -- wrongly convicted, sentenced and executed -- in order to secure
the execution of five rightly convicted murderers? And even if we were,
could that public policy be called 'just'? I believe it cannot."

He was just getting wound up.

"Individual human dignity is the concept that leads brave individuals to
sacrifice their own lives for the lives of strangers," O'Malley said.
"Individual human dignity is the truth universal that is the basis of all
ethics. Individual human dignity is the fundamental belief upon which all
laws of this state and this republic are founded. And absent a deterrent
value, I truly believe that the damage done by our conscious communal use of
the death penalty to the concept of human dignity is greater than the
benefit of even a justly drawn retribution.

"

It was a gutsy approach, even in a heavily Democratic state. And O'Malley
will find out if his risk is rewarded. Maybe Geffen would bankroll the
movie.

---

Source : Post Bulletin (Michael Tackett is the Chicago Tribune's Washington
Bureau chief. His e-mail address is mtacket@ttribune.com.)

http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?a=2861
02&z=12

Shutting Down Death Row

2007-02-28T15:17:00.000-08:00

Shutting Down Death Row
Illinois' death-penalty reforms may presage a fairer criminal-justice system.

By Jean M. Templeton
Issue Date: 07.01.04

Change in the criminal-justice system is a rare thing. Change in death-penalty policy is even more rare. Yet Illinois undertook a comprehensive reassessment of its death-penalty system recently, passing reforms that will have far-reaching impacts on how murder trials are handled in the state -- and that could serve as a model for reform in the rest of the country.

Following the review, 11 men were released from death row, and the furor over the death penalty only escalated after the 1999 release of death-row inmate Anthony Porter. Porter had been convicted of a double murder, believed to be a holdup gone bad, in a Chicago park in 1982. A mere 50 hours before Porter's execution, his lawyers made a last-ditch attempt to save him by asserting new questions about his mental competence. His execution was stayed, and in the intervening months, journalism students working in cooperation with a private detective located another man who confessed to the murder. Porter was released.

The case, and the flood of media attention that accompanied it, was enough to raise doubts about the death-penalty system even among death-penalty supporters, including George Ryan, then the Republican governor of Illinois. In early 2000, Ryan took the bold step of declaring a moratorium on executions in the state until a panel of experts, the Illinois Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment, could make recommendations about how the system might be improved. In 2002, after two years of intensive study, the blue-ribbon commission released a report making 85 recommendations for improving the state's capital-punishment system. Late last year, the Illinois Legislature adopted many of the recommended reforms, and current Governor Rod Blagojevich has pledged to continue the moratorium until the reforms' effectiveness can be assessed.

While both prosecution and defense supported many of the commission's recommendations, there were two that proved controversial. The first required videotaping of police interrogations; the second involved changes in lineup procedures to make eyewitness identifications more reliable. Both recommendations were initially opposed by law enforcement, and it took determined advocacy by legislators before they were included in last year's reforms. Now that they are law, they may produce far-reaching effects on the investigation of homicides in the state.

Because we often believe that our eyes don't deceive us, we tend to think that eyewitness accounts of a crime are the very best evidence of what actually occurred. Certainly juries often find it persuasive. Unfortunately, as extensive investigation by psychologists has shown, eyewitness evidence may not be especially reliable. The Illinois commission therefore recommended broad changes in the procedures for police lineups.

In a lineup, an eyewitness to or victim of a serious crime views a group of people or photos at the police station. The crime suspect is among the group, and the witness is asked whether he or she can identify anyone in the lineup. Generally speaking, the law requires that the other people in the lineup bear some resemblance to the suspect's description so that the suspect won't stand out. If the witness or victim identifies one of the group, a report is made of the identification.

Research shows, however, that witnesses often choose the person in the lineup who looks most like the person who committed the crime. In other words, they make a relative judgment. This process may produce a correct identification if the actual suspect is present. But if he or she is not, many people will simply select the person who most resembles him or her. This selection of the wrong person, what social scientists call a "false positive," can lead to the prosecution of an innocent person.

In an effort to eradicate false positives, Iowa psychologist Gary Wells and others have developed an alternative identification procedure called a "sequential lineup." In this procedure, the eyewitness looks at each person in the lineup separately, without observing the others in the group. The eyewitness then makes more of an absolute judgment about that person before observing other people or photos in the lineup. This process reduces the rate of mistaken identifications without substantively reducing the number of accurate identifications.

A majority of the Illinois commission recommended adopting sequential lineups. However, because existing methods had already met with court approval, some commission members had reservations about mandating a procedure radically different from that which was already in place. But one legislator with fairly conservative views on the death penalty argued persuasively for the change.

Representative Julie Hamos, a Democrat, represents a relatively liberal district along the north-shore suburbs of Chicago. Early in her legal career, she served as a policy adviser for the Cook County state's attorney's office, the largest prosecutor's office in Illinois. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a conservative law-and-order Democrat, was the state's attorney in those days. Hamos herself supported the death penalty for heinous crimes.

Elected to the legislature in 1998, Hamos represents a district that includes many opponents of the death penalty. Troubled by the number of men released from death row in Illinois and affected by activism among her constituents on the issue, she began to modify her own views. Hamos also came to realize the frailties inherent in eyewitness testimony after conversations with Wells.

In 2002, she introduced a bill to require the use of sequential lineups. Prospects for passage seemed dim. But when the "Report of the Governor's Commission on the Death Penalty" was released in April of that year with a similar recommendation, Hamos renewed her efforts, working quietly among the Democratic leadership to ensure that the lineup proposals were on the table.

The measure failed that year, but as the legislature began its journey toward death-penalty reform in 2003, Hamos persuaded the leadership to include it again. In response to law-enforcement concerns, the proposal was limited to development of a pilot program that would enable the procedures to be tested in several police districts in the state. When that legislation passed in November 2003, sequential lineups were part of the bargain. By July 1, 2004, the Illinois State Police was to have identified three pilot police departments, one of which must be the city of Chicago, in which sequential lineups and photo spreads will be tested. A report on the program's effectiveness will be filed with the Illinois General Assembly by September 1, 2005.

Not every homicide case involves eyewitnesses, however, which often leaves police the task of interrogating a suspect in order to try to obtain a confession. A person's confession of murder is powerful evidence to prove guilt, and under the law it must have been made voluntarily. Where there is some dispute over whether the statement is voluntary, a defendant may seek to prevent the use of the statement as evidence against him or her.

As the debate over the inadequacies of the Illinois death-penalty system evolved, there were those who charged that some death-row convictions were based on confessions that were not true or not voluntary. Final statements in which a defendant confessed had been videotaped in the Cook County state's attorney's office since 1999. While videotaping these confessions has proven useful to demonstrate what the suspect actually said, critics complained that the program failed to capture the questioning process itself, in which undue pressure may be put on suspects to agree with the police version of events. Reformers in Illinois, including the governor's commission, pushed for the videotaping of the entire interrogation process.

Videotaping the process is important because academic studies suggest that there are circumstances under which people will confess falsely. One group known to do so are the mentally retarded, who sometimes confess in order to please authority figures. In 2000, a young Chicago man named Corethian Bell was arrested for killing his mother. Bell, described as mentally ill and borderline retarded, gave a videotaped confession that he had, indeed, killed his mother. Subsequent DNA testing, however, suggested that another man might have been guilty of the crime, and Bell was released from jail and charges against him dropped -- despite his confession.

More troubling are confessions coming from those who may have been unduly pressured or abused. In the late 1980s, complaints began to surface that a group of Chicago police officers, led by then–Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, had brutalized suspects in order to obtain confessions. The allegations went beyond rough treatment during arrest to claims of systematic torture. Suspects alleged that they were beaten, shocked with electrical currents, and threatened with being shot in order to compel confessions. Although Burge denied the charges, he was fired in 1993 for physical brutality against a suspect. None of the police officers alleged to have been involved faced criminal charges. In 2002, almost 10 years later, a special prosecutor was appointed to look into the allegations. Media reports suggest that the number of possible cases of torture has now risen to more than 100. The special prosecutor's report is expected sometime this year.

Proponents of videotaping interrogations point to these incidents to support their case. Videotaping the entire process, they say, would protect suspects from abuses and police officers from unfounded charges of brutality. Yet in Illinois, the proposal failed to gain wide acceptance among police departments. Officials said it would interfere with police work or that it would be too costly. Bills to implement some form of videotaping of interrogations were introduced in the Illinois Legislature in 1999, but they never got a hearing. The Illinois House revisited the issue in 2001, and it did pass provisions requiring videotaped interrogations, but the bill did not get a hearing in the Illinois Senate. It was not until control of the state Senate changed hands in the 2002 elections that a videotaping bill appeared headed for passage.

Credit for getting the videotaping bill into the final death-penalty package has been largely attributed to state Senator Barack Obama, a Democrat from Chicago. Obama is now running a strong race for the U.S. Senate, which, if successful, would make him the third African American senator since Reconstruction. Elected to the Illinois Legislature in 1996, he is considered an extremely effective legislator. Rather than accept law-enforcement opposition to the bill, he brought law-enforcement officials to the table for discussion, eventually persuading them to drop their opposition.

Illinois thus became the first state in the nation to pass legislation requiring the videotaping of interrogations. The legislation applies to what are called "custodial interrogations" -- those occurring at a police station -- in all homicide cases. The law works by preventing statements made by a suspect from being admitted in a court proceeding unless the statement was recorded electronically. Under limited circumstances, the prosecution may use unrecorded statements in court if they prove that the statement was voluntarily given and is reliable. The provisions represent a significant change from prior law, which permitted the prosecution to use a statement made by a defendant and put the burden on the defendant to prove that the statement was not given voluntarily. Under the new law, the burden shifts to the prosecution to prove that a statement made outside of an electronic recording process was made voluntarily and is reliable.

Provisions requiring electronic recording do not take effect until 2005 in order to allow time to develop procedures governing the recording. In the meantime, legislation was passed to establish several pilot programs throughout the state to record interrogations in murder cases. These programs will help police agencies develop procedures on how videotaping the interrogation process should occur and provide training for police officers in how to conduct videotaped interrogations.

In Illinois, these innovative proposals -- videotaping interrogations and sequential lineups -- apply not only to death-penalty cases but to others as well. While officials were initially reluctant to embrace the proposals, their widespread use will ultimately lead to better documentation of evidence and reduce wrongful convictions of all types. In departments where interrogations are videotaped and initial police resistance overcome, we have seen positive benefits, including a sharpening of police interview skills. Over the long term, police will likely come to appreciate these more rigorous investigative techniques.

Improvements in the death-penalty system have gathered increased support among legislators and the public. The reforms in Illinois passed by a nearly unanimous vote of the legislature. And public-opinion polling in February of 2003 suggests a softening of public attitudes on the death penalty in Illinois, with the percentage of state residents who support the death penalty at 55 percent, which is well below national polling figures.

Meanwhile, DNA testing continues to be carried out, leading to the release of innocent men and women -- more persuasive proof that our criminal-justice system makes mistakes, which is key in promoting death-penalty reform. The recommendations produced by the governor's commission in Illinois have become a standard by which other states have begun to evaluate their own death-penalty systems. In California, for instance, scholars have recently undertaken a systematic comparison of that state's death-penalty process with the Illinois recommendations and have illuminated many weaknesses.

In North Carolina, advocates of a death-penalty moratorium, modeled on Illinois Governor Ryan's, have gained ground with policy-makers. The North Carolina Senate passed moratorium provisions last year, and advocates are seeking approval in the North Carolina House. Public-opinion polling done by moratorium supporters indicates that 63 percent of those polled favor a moratorium on executions in the state pending a review of the death-penalty system. The North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers has released its own list of reforms that should be considered during such a moratorium, including a number of the same substantive reforms suggested in Illinois.

The discussion over reforming the death-penalty system, and the successful passage of so many reforms, has led to a broader evaluation of the criminal-justice system in Illinois and elsewhere. Greater scrutiny of death-penalty cases involving wrongful convictions is slowly leading observers to ask whether there are other miscarriages of justice we have yet to uncover in the rest of the criminal-justice system, where cases are given a far less rigorous review. Death-penalty reforms, then, may be a first step on the road to broader evaluation of the criminal-justice system itself.

Missouri groups lobby for death penalty moratorium

2007-02-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

February 22, 2007

Missouri

Missouri groups lobby for death penalty moratorium

By Bob Watson, News Tribune

State Rep. Bill Deeken promised no miracles Tuesday when he talked about his
bill seeking a three-year moratorium on Missouri executions.

"I feel very confident that we will get a hearing this year, which is, I
think, the most important thing," said Deeken, R-Jefferson City. "Will we
get it passed this year? No.

"I've found out that you just don't come up with a bill and get it passed
right away."

Deeken's bill would place a moratorium on all executions in Missouri until
Jan. 1, 2011, and create a 10-member Commission on the Death Penalty to
study the use of the death penalty and recommend changes to state laws and
court rules regarding death penalty cases.

That commission would include lawmakers, defense and prosecution lawyers,
the Attorney General and family members of a murder victim and of a death
row inmate.

Deeken told more than 50 Missourians who came to Jefferson City to lobby for
the bill that the Missouri Catholic Conference asked him to sponsor it.

"The first thing I told them was, I am in favor of the death penalty,"
Deeken reported, "but we've got to do something about the people that are
being put to death that are not guilty - and we're finding this out more and
more, all the time."

Tom Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor with a 50-year history of legal
battles, co-chaired Illinois Gov. George Ryan's Capital Punishment Study
Commission.

Like Missouri, Sullivan said, Illinois' system had a lot of "bias in the
application of the death penalty" because each county's prosecutor decides
which cases to prosecute as death cases, with "no systematic review of what
they do - so you'll see a very great disparity among the cases that are
selected for death."

Ultimately, Sullivan said, Missouri should join the dozen other U.S. states
that don't have a death penalty.

"The deterrent effect of it is a joke," he said. "The death penalty is a
dumb law - stupid, costly and far more expensive than to put somebody in
jail, if they did it.

"And if you make a mistake, it's irreversible."

While many in the crowd agreed with Sullivan, they were encouraged to lobby
only for the moratorium right now.

Redditt Hudson, Racial Justice manager for the American Civil Liberties
Union of Eastern Missouri, told the crowd: "Our mission is worthy ... moral
(and) just."

Hudson struggles with the issue of the criminal justice system's just-ness
and fairness, when there have been 128 exonerations nationwide "where
innocent people have been shown to be innocent, yet (are) on death row,
scheduled to be executed."

"It doesn't mean I'm pro-criminal," he said. "It doesn't mean I'm
anti-law-enforcement.

"It means that as a human being, and for the sake of our collective
humanity, we have to do a better job of delivering the justice process to
the people who are in our system."

---

Source : News Tribune

Anti-Death-Penalty Governor Gets Nobel Nomination

2007-02-01T23:37:00.000-08:00

Anti-Death-Penalty Governor Gets Nobel Nomination

From: The Campaign to Support the Nomination of George H. Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan Nominated For The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle has nominated former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous and heroic opposition to the death penalty system in America.

Despite tremendous opposition and criticism, Ryan single-handedly started what he calls a "rational discussion" on capital punishment in 2000 when he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium. To this day, despite paying a heavy personal price for his courage, integrity, and principles, Ryan remains committed to the principle of seeking justice for the poor and oppressed. Ryan now takes his message globally, recently speaking before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Switzerland, continuing to initiate dialogue against the barbaric use of capital punishment around the world.

Directly because of Ryan's imposed 2000 moratorium, a tidal wave of change has gained momentum in the United States. Death sentences are at a 30-year low, while the number of executions has dropped to a 10-year-low. And for the first time in two decades, more Americans now support life sentences over death as the proper punishment for capital crimes. New Jersey's governor signed into law a one-year moratorium on executions due to public demand, and Florida's Governor Bush suspended all executions until methods of execution can be examined in that state. California now has an imposed moratorium, and Ohio's new governor has stated moral questions concerning the use of capital punishment.

The American Bar Association has also now declared that there should be a blanket moratorium on all executions in the United States because of widespread problems with the quality of defense given to poor and indigent capital defendants. As Governor Ryan exposed to the country in 2000, the burden of capital punishment consistently falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the forgotten underpriviledged members of society, and is often used as a racist institution against people of color.

The United States’ attitude towards capital punishment is undeniably changing, and as a direct result of Ryan’s historical acts as former Governor of Illinois. Ryan exposed capital punishment to be a distorted means of justice rife with flaws and defects, and he began the dialogue that will one day abolish capital punishment in America.

Professor Francis A. Boyle has stated that, "George Ryan is the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America," and it is for this reason that he richly deserves to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Joining him on the nomination papers were Chicago Attorneys Karen Conti, Greg Adamski and Jerome Boyle.

Illinois Gov. George Ryan halted all executions

2007-01-31T05:39:00.000-08:00

The Almanac: Today is Wednesday, Jan. 31

January 31 in History

In 2000, Illinois Gov. George Ryan halted all executions in his state after several death row inmates were found to be innocent of the crimes for which they were about to be put to death.

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan Nominated For The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

2007-01-30T09:57:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – January 30, 2007.

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan Nominated For The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle has nominated former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous and heroic opposition to the death penalty system in America.

Despite tremendous opposition and criticism, Ryan single-handedly started what he calls a "rational discussion" on capital punishment in 2000 when he declared the Illinois death penalty moratorium.

To this day, despite paying a heavy personal price for his courage, integrity, and principles, Ryan remains committed to the principle of seeking justice for the poor and oppressed. Ryan now takes his message globally, recently speaking before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Switzerland, continuing to initiate dialogue against the barbaric use of capital punishment around the world.

Directly because of Ryan's imposed 2000 moratorium, a tidal wave of change has gained momentum in the United States. Death sentences are at a 30-year low, while the number of executions has dropped to a 10-year-low. And for the first time in two decades, more Americans now support life sentences over death as the proper punishment for capital crimes.

New Jersey's governor signed into law a one-year moratorium on executions due to public demand, and Florida's Governor Bush suspended all executions until methods of execution can be examined in that state.

California now has an imposed moratorium, and Ohio's new governor has stated moral questions concerning the use of capital punishment.

The American Bar Association has also now declared that there should be a blanket moratorium on all executions in the United States because of widespread problems with the quality of defense given to poor and indigent capital defendants.

As Governor Ryan exposed to the country in 2000, the burden of capital punishment consistently falls upon the poor, the ignorant and the forgotten underpriviledged members of society, and is often used as a racist institution against people of color.

The United States’ attitude towards capital punishment is undeniably changing, and as a direct result of Ryan’s historical acts as former Governor of Illinois. Ryan exposed capital punishment to be a distorted means of justice rife with flaws and defects, and he began the dialogue that will one day abolish capital punishment in America.

Professor Francis A. Boyle has stated that, "George Ryan is the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America," and it is for this reason that he richly deserves to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Joining him on the nomination papers were Chicago Attorneys Karen Conti, Greg Adamski and Jerome Boyle.

A Talk With Governor George Ryan

2007-01-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

by BRUCE SHAPIRO
[from the January 8, 2001 issue]

If you sent to central casting for a Midwestern conservative, they'd send back Governor George Ryan of Illinois. With his white hair, plain business suit and heartland directness, Ryan is nobody's image of a crusading criminal-justice reformer. Not even his own. "I mean, I am a Republican pharmacist from Kankakee. All of a sudden I've got gays and lesbians by my side. African-Americans. Senators from Italy, groups from around the world. It's a little surprising."

A year ago in January, Ryan took a step unprecedented in the history of American capital punishment: He issued an open-ended moratorium on executions in Illinois. The immediate impetus: the exoneration of thirteen death-row inmates. Ryan's predecessor, Governor Jim Edgar, called those exonerations proof that "the system works." Ryan saw something different.

Ryan's moratorium received international attention, but his journey to that decision remained a largely private matter. He did not make the decision in a vacuum--legislators, lawyers and the media played a big role--but what led him to break so definitively with the bipartisan pro-execution consensus, and where his thinking has gone since, strikes at the core of the shifting politics of death.

Ryan, whose family owned several neighborhood drugstores in Kankakee for forty years, joined the Illinois legislature in the 1970s as a staunch law-and-order man. "I believed some crimes were so heinous that the only proper way of protecting society was execution. I saw a nation in the grip of increasing crime rates; and tough sentences, more jails, the death penalty--that was good government." In 1977, after the Supreme Court lifted its ban on execution, a bill to reinstate the death penalty came before the Statehouse in Springfield. When an anti-death-penalty legislator asked his colleagues to consider whether they personally would be willing to throw the switch, Ryan rose to his feet with "unequivocal words of support" for execution--words he now regrets. The truth, though, was that Ryan never thought about capital punishment much, before that vote or for more than twenty years afterward, except as an abstract idea of justice. "I supported the death penalty, I believed in the death penalty, I voted for the death penalty."

In September 1998, as Ryan was running for governor, an Illinois inmate named Anthony Porter, a man with an IQ of 51, was scheduled to die for a 1982 murder. Two days before Porter's execution date his lawyers won a temporary reprieve. Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess turned his investigative-reporting students loose on the case, and by February the evidence they obtained left the newly inaugurated Governor Ryan reeling: a videotaped confession by the real killer, freeing Porter after eighteen years. "I was caught completely off-guard. Maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was. That mentally retarded man came within two days of execution, and but for those students Anthony Porter would have been dead and buried. I felt jolted into re-examining everything I believed in." At first, a conflicted Ryan waffled on a full-fledged review of Illinois's capital apparatus, but ultimately he endorsed one concrete initiative: an $18 million capital-crimes-litigation fund to insure that defendants like Porter, as well as prosecutors, have access to investigative resources.

That experience also collided, within weeks, with a gubernatorial responsibility Ryan himself had helped enact: signing off on an execution. In the spring of 1999 the case of Andrew Kokoraleis landed on Ryan's desk. Kokoraleis had been found guilty of the rape, mutilation and murder of a 21-year-old woman. "This was a horrible crime, and I am the father of five daughters. But after the mistakes the system had made with Porter, I wasn't sure what to do. I agonized. I checked and double-checked and triple-checked the facts." In the end Ryan went through with it, and Kokoraleis was executed. But, says Ryan, "it was the most emotional experience I have ever been through in my life. It all came down to me--the one fellow who has to pull the switch. Quite frankly, that is too much to ask of one person."

Within three months, two more Illinois death-row inmates were exonerated: one by DNA evidence, the other when a jailhouse informant's testimony was discredited. The state judiciary began its own investigation, and the calls for a moratorium grew. Still, "I was resisting." But one day "the attorney general called seeking a new execution date for an inmate. In my heart at that moment, I couldn't go forward with it." Political cynics wondered if Ryan shifted his position to deflect attention from charges of corruption against his Secretary of State, but Ryan's description of his internal turmoil is compelling. "I knew I couldn't make myself live through what I'd experienced with Kokoraleis," he says. "I just couldn't do it again."

In the fall of 1999 the Chicago Tribune published an examination of every Illinois death-row case since 1977, revealing, among other things, that more than one-third of all 285 Illinois capital convictions over that period had been reversed because of "fundamental error." It was the final straw. Last January Ryan acted, unilaterally issuing his moratorium. He also assembled a commission, including such notable death-penalty opponents as Scott Turow and former Senator Paul Simon, to report on the roots of Illinois's false-conviction record. Ryan's moratorium--combined with relentless reporting by the Tribune--has had a seismic impact on Illinois politics. The commission's hearings have insured that death-row injustice is never far from the front page.

Ryan's position has changed over the past year. In May he told Northwestern students he doubted there would be another execution on his watch. Now, he is convinced that "moral certainty" in capital cases isn't possible. And he's broadened his focus: "My concern is not just with the death penalty as a singular issue; it's with the entire criminal justice system. If innocent people are sentenced to death--cases that get all kinds of scrutiny--what does that say about invisible, low-level cases, drug cases and so on?" Ryan has ordered the first wholesale reassessment of Illinois's criminal code in forty years; when he talks about sentencing disparities for drug offenses he sounds more like Jesse Jackson than Dennis Hastert.

Ryan argues, with great passion, that criminal-justice reformers need to extend their traditional concern for the poor to middle-class and suburban defendants--building a bridge to new constituencies. "I have seen people charged in drug cases where down comes the full force of the federal Treasury," he says. "Someone who is poor will get a free lawyer. But a truck driver, for instance, will have to mortgage his house and sell his rig to pay a lawyer. Then, when he is found not guilty, where can he go to get that house back, to get on with his life?"

These days Ryan often gets asked how he feels about fellow Republican George W. Bush's love affair with executions. He says he's had a "short conversation" with Bush about it and quickly adds that he has far more authority than Bush to halt individual executions.

Ryan's transformation is a journey still in progress. Most Americans will never have the occasion to feel revulsion for their own role in an execution. But that "jolt" he felt, and the moral anguish that followed, mirror a growing public unease. "A lot of people are like me, I think. The death penalty was a fact of life," he says. "But as people become more and more aware of the unfairness, they become less enthusiastic." Ryan, the heartland conservative, has tested his lifelong support for the death penalty against the evidence, and the institution has come up short: "I question the entire system and the people connected with it."

Governor Ryan's Commutation Announcement

2007-01-21T07:13:00.000-08:00

Center on Wrongful Convictions
Governor Ryan's Commutation Announcement

Governor George H. Ryan's Address

Governor Ryan at Northwestern University School of Law, January 11, 2003 (Photo: Mary Hanlon)

Four years ago I was sworn in as the 39th Governor of Illinois. That was just four short years ago – that’s when I was a firm believer in the American System of Justice and the death penalty. I believed that the ultimate penalty for the taking of a life was administrated in a just and fair manner.

Today – 3 days before I end my term as Governor, I stand before you to explain my frustrations and deep concerns about both the administration and the penalty of death. It is fitting that we are gathered here today at Northwestern University with the students, teachers, lawyers and investigators who first shed light on the sorrowful condition of Illinois’ death penalty system. Professors Larry Marshall, Dave Protess have and their students along with investigators Paul Ciolino have gone above the call. They freed the falsely accused Ford Heights Four, they saved Anthony Porter’s life, they fought for Rolando Cruz and Alex Hernandez.

Before I go on, I need to take a moment to talk about Larry and Dave. Never have I met anyone with more passion or with a fiercer sense of Justice than these two men. They have a vision for what the Justice system can be, and they are an inspiration. It is also proper that we are together with dedicated people like Andrea Lyon who has labored on the front lines trying capital cases for many years and who is now devoting her passion to creating an innocence center at De Paul University. Andrea Lyon saved Madison Hobley’s life.

Together they spared the lives and secured the freedom of 17 men – men who were wrongfully convicted and rotting in the condemned units of our state prisons. Andrea, what you have achieved is of the highest calling. What you have achieved is of the highest calling – THANK YOU!

Yes, it is right that I am here with you, where, in a manner of speaking, my journey from staunch supporters of capital punishment to reformer all began. But I must tell you – since the beginning of our journey – my thoughts and feelings about the death penalty have changed many, many times. I realize that over the course of my reviews I had said that I would not do blanket commutation. I have also said it was an option that was there and I would consider all options.

During my time in public office I have always reserved my right to change my mind if I believed it to be in the best public interest, whether it be about taxes, abortions or the death penalty. But I must confess that the debate with myself has been the toughest concerning the death penalty. I suppose the reason the death penalty has been the toughest is because it is so final – the only public policy that determines who lives and who dies. In addition it is the only issue that attracts most of the legal minds across the country. I have received more advice on this issue than any other policy issue I have dealt with in my 35 years of public service. I have kept an open mind on both sides of the issues of commutation for life or death.

I have read, listened to and discussed the issue with the families of the victims as well as the families of the condemned. I know that any decision I make will not be accepted by one side or the other. I know that my decision will be just that - my decision – based on all the facts I could gather over the past 3 years. I may never be comfortable with my final decision, but I will know in my heart, that I did my very best to do the right thing.

Having said that I want to share a story with you: I grew up in Kankakee which even today is still a small Midwestern town, a place where people tend to know each other. Steve Small was a neighbor. He and his wife would look after our young children – when Lura Lynn and I were gone, which was not for the faint of heart since Lura Lynn and I had six children, 5 of them under the age of 3. He was a bright young man who helped run the family business. He and his wife had three children of their own. Lura Lynn was especially close to him and his family. We took comfort in knowing he was there for us and we for him.

One September midnight he received a call at his home. There had been a break-in at the nearby house he was renovating. But as he left his house, he was seized at gunpoint by kidnappers. His captors buried him alive in a shallow hole. He died before police could find him.
His killer led investigators to where Steve’s body was buried. The killer, Danny Edward was also from my hometown. He now sits on death row. I also know his family. I share this story with you so that you know I don’t come to this as a neophyte without having experienced a small bit of the bitter pill the survivors of murder must swallow.

My responsibilities and obligations are more than my neighbors and my family. I represent all the people of Illinois. The decision I make about our criminal justice system is felt not only here, but the world over.

The other day, I received a call from former South African President Nelson Mandela who reminded me that the United States sets the example for justice and fairness for the rest of the world. Today the United States is not in league with most of our major allies: Europe, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, most of South and Central America. These countries rejected the death penalty. We are partners in death with several third world countries. Even Russia has called a moratorium.

The death penalty has been abolished in 12 states. In none of these states has the homicide rate increased. In Illinois last year we had about 1000 murders, only 2 percent of that 1000 were sentenced to death. Where is the fairness and equality in that? The death penalty in Illinois is not imposed fairly or uniformly because of the absence of standards for the 102 Illinois State Attorneys, who must decide whether to request the death sentence. Should geography be a factor in determining who gets the death sentence? I don’t think so, but in Illinois it makes a difference. You are 5 times more likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in the rural area of Illinois than you are in Cook County. Where is the justice and fairness in that – where is the proportionality?

The Most Reverend Desmond Tutu wrote to me this week stating that “to take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, it is not justice. He says justice allows for mercy, clemency and compassion. These virtues are not weakness.”

"In fact the most glaring weakness is that no matter how efficient and fair the death penalty may seem in theory, in actual practice it is primarily inflicted upon the weak, the poor, the ignorant and against racial minorities. " That was a quote from former California Governor Pat Brown. He wrote that in his book – Public Justice, Private Mercy he wrote that nearly 50 years ago – nothing has changed in nearly 50 years.

I never intended to be an activist on this issue. Soon after taking office, I watched in surprise and amazement as freed death row inmate Anthony Porter was released from jail. A free man, he ran into the arms of Northwestern University Professor Dave Protess who poured his heart and soul into proving Porter’s innocence with his journalism students.

He was 48 hours away from being wheeled into the execution chamber where the state would kill him.

It would all be so antiseptic that most of us would not have even paused, except that Anthony Porter was innocent of the double murder for which he had been condemned to die. After Mr. Porter’s case there was the report by Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong documenting the systemic failures of our capital punishment system. Half of the nearly 300 capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or resentencing. Nearly half!
33 of the death row inmates were represented at trial by an attorney who had later been disbarred or at some point suspended from practicing law.

Of the more than 160 death row inmates, 35 were African American defendants who had been convicted or condemned to die by all-white juries. More than two-thirds of the inmates on death row were African American. 46 inmates were convicted on the basis of testimony from jailhouse informants. I can recall looking at these cases and the information from the Mills/Armstrong series and asking my staff: How does that happen? How in God's name does that happen?
I have been asking this question for nearly 3 years and so far no one has answered.

Then over the next few months there were three more exonerated men, freed because their sentence hinged on a jailhouse informant or new DNA technology proved beyond a shadow of doubt their innocence.

We then had the dubious distinction of exonerating more men than we had executed. 13 men found innocent, 12 executed. As I reported yesterday, there is not a doubt in my mind that the number of innocent men freed from our Death Row stands at 17, with the pardons of Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard and Leroy Orange.

That is what is outrageous and unconscionable. 17 exonerated death row inmates is nothing short of a catastrophic failure. But the 13, now 17 men, is just the beginning of our sad arithmetic in prosecuting murder cases. During the time we have had capital punishment in Illinois, there were at least 33 other people wrongly convicted on murder charges and exonerated. Since we reinstated the death penalty there are also 93 people – 93 – where our criminal justice system imposed the most severe sanction and later rescinded the sentence or even released them from custody because they were innocent.

How many more cases of wrongful conviction have to occur before we can all agree that the system is broken?
Throughout this process, I have heard many different points of view expressed. I have had the opportunity to review all of the cases involving the inmates on death row. I have conducted private group meetings, one in Springfield and one in Chicago, with the surviving family members of homicide victims. Everyone in the room who wanted to speak had the opportunity to do so. Some wanted to express their grief, others wanted to express their anger. I took it all in.

My commission and my staff had been reviewing each and every case for three years. But, I redoubled my effort to review each case personally in order to respond to the concerns of prosecutors and victims’ families. This individual review also naturally resulted in a collective examination of our entire death penalty system.

I also had a meeting with a group of people who are less often heard from, and who are not as popular with the media. The family members of death row inmates have a special challenge to face. I spent an afternoon with those family members at a church here in Chicago. At that meeting, I heard a different kind of pain expressed. Many of these families live with the twin pain of knowing not only that, in some cases, their family members may have been responsible for inflicting a terrible trauma on another family, but also the pain of knowing that, society has called for another killing. These parents, siblings and children are not to blame for the crime committed, yet these innocent stand to have their loved ones killed by the state. As Mr. Mandela told me, they are also branded and scarred for life because of the awful crime committed by their family member.

Others were even more tormented by the fact that their loved one was another victim, that their loved one was truly innocent of the crime for which they had been sentenced to die.
It was at this meeting that I looked into the face of Claude Lee, the father of Eric Lee, who was convicted of killing Kankakee police officer Anthony Samfay a few years ago. It was a traumatic moment, once again, for my hometown. A brave officer, part of that thin blue line that protects each of us, was struck down by wanton violence. If you will kill a police officer, you have absolutely no respect for the laws of man or God.

I’ve known the Lee family for many years. There does not appear to be much question that Eric was guilty of killing the officer. However, I can say now after our review, there is also not much question that Eric is seriously ill, with a history of treatment for mental illness going back a number of years.

The crime he committed was a terrible one – killing a police officer. Society demands that the highest penalty be paid. But I had to ask myself – could I send another man’s son to death under the deeply flawed system of capital punishment we have in Illinois? A troubled young man, with a history of mental illness? Could I rely on the system of justice we have in Illinois not to make another horrible mistake? Could I rely on a fair sentencing?

In the United States the overwhelming majority of those executed are psychotic, alcoholic, drug addicted or mentally unstable. They frequently are raised in an impoverished and abusive environment. Seldom are people with money or prestige convicted of capital offenses, even more seldom are they executed.

To quote Governor Brown again – he said “society has both the right and the moral duty to protect itself against its enemies. This natural and prehistoric axiom has never successfully been refuted. If by ordered death, society is really protected and our homes and institutions guarded, then even the most extreme of all penalties can be justified.”

“Beyond its honor and incredibility, it has neither protected the innocent nor deterred the killers. Publicly sanctioned killing has cheapened human life and dignity without the redeeming grace which comes from justice delivered swiftly, evenly, humanely.”

At stake throughout the clemency process, was whether some, all or none of these inmates on death row would have their sentences commuted from death to life without the possibility parole. One of the things discussed with family members was life without parole was seen as a life filled with perks and benefits.

Some inmates on death row don't want a sentence of life without parole. Danny Edwards wrote me and told me not to do him any favors because he didn't want to face a prospect of a life in prison without parole. They will be confined in a cell that is about 6-feet-by-12 feet, usually double-bunked. Our prisons have no air conditioning, except at our supermax facility where inmates are kept in their cell 23 hours a day. In summer months, temperatures in these prisons exceed one hundred degrees. It is a stark and dreary existence. They can think about their crimes. Life without parole has even, at times, been described by prosecutors as a fate worse than death.

Yesterday, I mentioned a lawsuit in Livingston County where a judge ruled the state corrections department cannot force feed two corrections inmates who are on a hunger strike. The judge ruled that suicide by hunger strike was not an irrational action by the inmates, given what their future holds.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional and cruel and unusual punishment to execute the mentally retarded. It is now the law of the land. How many people have we already executed who were mentally retarded and are now dead and buried? Although we now know that they have been killed by the state unconstitutionally and illegally. Is that fair? Is that right?

This court decision was last spring. The General Assembly failed to pass any measure defining what constitutes mental retardation. We are a rudderless ship because they failed to act.

This is even after the Illinois Supreme Court also told lawmakers that it is their job and it must be done. I started with this issue because I was and still am concerned about innocence. But once I studied, once I pondered what had become of our justice system, I came to care above all about fairness. Fairness is fundamental to the American system of justice and our way of life.
The facts I have seen in reviewing each and every one of these cases raised questions not only about the innocence of people on death row, but about the fairness of the death penalty system as a whole.

If the system was making so many errors in determining whether someone was guilty in the first place, how fairly and accurately was it determining which guilty defendants deserved to live and which deserved to die? What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

And in almost every one of the exonerated 17, we not only have breakdowns in the system with police, prosecutors and judges, we have terrible cases of shabby defense lawyers. There is just no way to sugar coat it. There are defense attorneys that did not consult with their clients, did not investigate the case and were completely unqualified to handle complex death penalty cases. They often didn’t put much effort into fighting a death sentence. If your life is on the line, your lawyer ought to be fighting extra hard for you. As I have said before, there is more than enough blame to go around.

I had more questions. In Illinois, I have learned, we have 102 decision makers. Each of them are politically elected, each beholden to the demands of their community and, in some cases, to the media or especially vocal victims’ families. I ask you, in cases that have the attention of the media and the public, are decisions to seek the death penalty more likely to occur? What standards are these prosecutors using?

Some people have assailed my power to commute sentences, a power that literally hundreds of legal scholars from across the country have defended. But prosecutors in Illinois have the ultimate commutation power, a power that is exercised every day. They decide who will be subject to the death penalty, who will get a plea deal or even who may get a complete pass on prosecution. By what objective standards do they make these decisions? We do not know, they are not public. There were more than 1000 murders last year in Illinois. There is no doubt that all murders are wrong and cruel. Yet, less than 2 percent of those murder defendants will receive the death penalty. That means more than 98% of victims’ families do not get, and will not receive, whatever satisfaction can be derived from the execution of the murderer. Moreover, if you look at the cases, as I have done – both individually and collectively -- a killing with the same circumstances might get 40 years in one county and death in another county. I have also seen co-defendants who are equally guilty where one gets sentenced to a term of years, while another ends up on death row.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart has said that the imposition of the death penalty on defendants in this country is as freakish and arbitrary as who gets hit by a bolt of lightning.

In my case-by-case review, I found three cases that struck me as particularly unfair, troublesome and deserving of some form of commutation. In one of them, the murder victim’s family has publicly and privately urged me to act more aggressively than I will today. In the cases of Montell Johnson, Mario Flores and William Franklin, I am today commuting their sentences to a term of 40 years to fairly bring their sentences into line with their co-defendants and to reflect the other extraordinary circumstances of each of these cases.

For years the criminal justice system defended and upheld the imposition of the death penalty for the 17 exonerated inmates from Illinois Death row. Yet when the real killers are charged, prosecutors have often sought sentences of less than death. In the Ford Heights Four Case, Verneal Jimerson and Dennis Williams fought the death sentences imposed upon them for 18 years before they were exonerated. Later, Cook County prosecutors sought life in prison for two of the real killers and a sentence of 80 years for a third.

What made the murder for which the Ford Heights Four were sentenced to die less worthy of the death penalty twenty years later with a new set of defendants?

We have come very close to having our state Supreme Court rule out the death penalty statute - the one that I helped enact in 1977 – unconstitutional. Former State Supreme Court Justice Seymour Simon wrote to me that it was only happenstance that our statute was not struck down by the state's high court. When he joined the bench in 1980, three other justices had already said Illinois' death penalty was unconstitutional. But they got cold feet when a case came along to revisit the question. One judge wrote that he wanted to wait and see if the Supreme Court of the United States would rule on the constitutionality of the new Illinois law. Another said precedent required him to follow the old state Supreme Court ruling with which he disagreed.

Even a pharmacist knows that doesn't make sense. We wouldn't have a death penalty today, and we all wouldn't be struggling with this issue, if those votes had been different. How arbitrary.

Several years after we enacted our death penalty statute, Girvies Davis was executed. Justice Simon writes that he was executed because of this unconstitutional aspect of the Illinois law – the wide latitude that each Illinois State's Attorney has to determine what cases qualify for the death penalty. One State's Attorney decided not to ask for the death sentence when Davis' first sentencing was sent back to the trial court for a new sentencing hearing. Instead, he was going to ask a life sentence. But in the interim, a new State's Attorney was elected and he decided he wanted the death penalty. He was successful in getting the death sentence and Davis was executed. How fair is that?

After the flaws in our death penalty system were exposed, the Supreme Court of Illinois began to reform its rules and improve the procedures for trying capital cases. It changed the rule to require that State's Attorney's give advance notice to defendants that they plan to seek the death penalty, before trial instead of after conviction. The Supreme Court also enacted new discovery rules designed to prevent trials by ambush and to allow for better investigation of cases from the beginning.

But shouldn't that mean if you were tried or sentenced before these important and essential reforms were enacted, to correct a clearly flawed system, that you ought to get a new trial or sentencing that will be more fair, just and accurate? This issue has divided our Supreme Court, some saying yes, a majority saying no. These justices have a lifetime of experience with the criminal justice system and it concerns me that these great minds so strenuously differ on an issue of such importance, especially where life or death hangs in the balance.

What are we to make of the studies that showed that more than 50% of Illinois jurors could not understand the confusing and obscure sentencing instructions that were being used? What effect did that problem have on the trustworthiness of death sentences? A review of the cases shows that often even the lawyers and judges are confused about the instructions - let alone the jurors sitting in judgment. Cases still come before the Supreme Court with arguments about whether the jury instructions were proper.

As I have said, I spent a good deal of time reviewing these death row cases. My staff, many of whom are lawyers, spent busy days and many sleepless nights answering my questions, providing me with information, giving me advice. It became clear to me that whatever decision I made, I would be criticized. It also became clear to me that it was impossible to make reliable choices about whether our capital punishment system had really done its job.

As I came closer to my decision, I knew that I was going to have to face the question of whether I believed so completely in the choice I wanted to make that I could face the prospect of even commuting the death sentence of Daniel Edwards – the man who had killed a close family friend of mine. Lura Lynn was angry and disappointed at my decision like many of the families of other victims will be.

I was struck by the anger of the families of murder victims. To a family they talked about closure. They pleaded with me to allow the state to kill an inmate in its name to provide the families with closure. But is that the purpose of capital punishment? Is it to soothe the families? And is that truly what the families experience.

I cannot imagine losing a family member to murder. Nor can I imagine spending every waking day for 20 years with a single-minded focus to execute the killer. The system of death in Illinois is so unsure that it is not unusual for cases to take 20 years before they are resolved. And thank God. If it had moved any faster, then Anthony Porter, the Ford Heights Four, Ronald Jones, Madison Hobley and the other innocent men we've exonerated might be dead and buried.

But it is cruel and unusual punishment for family members to go through this pain, this legal limbo for 20 years. Perhaps it would be less cruel if we sentenced the killers to life in a 6x12 cell, and used our resources to better serve victims.

My heart ached when I heard one grandmother who lost children in an arson fire. She said she could not afford proper grave markers for her grandchildren who died. Why can't the state help families provide a proper burial?

Another crime victim came to our family meetings. He believes an inmate sent to death row for another crime also shot and paralyzed him. The inmate he says gets free health care while the victim is struggling to pay his substantial medical bills and, as a result, he has forgone getting proper medical care to alleviate the physical pain he endures.

What kind of victim’s services are we providing? Are all of our resources geared toward providing this notion of closure by execution instead of tending to the physical and social service needs of victim families? And what kind of values are we instilling in these wounded families and in the young people? As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye only leaves the whole world blind.

President Lincoln often talked of binding up wounds as he sought to preserve the Union. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

I have had to consider not only the horrible nature of the crimes that put men on death row in the first place, the terrible suffering of the surviving family members of the victims, the despair of the family members of the inmates, but I have also had to watch in frustration as members of the Illinois General Assembly failed to pass even one substantive death penalty reform. Not one. They couldn’t even agree on ONE. How much more evidence is needed before the General Assembly will take its responsibility in this area seriously?

The fact is that the failure of the General Assembly to act is merely a symptom of the larger problem. Many people express the desire to have capital punishment. Few, however, seem prepared to address the tough questions that arise when the system fails. It is easier and more comfortable for politicians to be tough on crime and support the death penalty. It wins votes. But when it comes to admitting that we have a problem, most run for cover. Prosecutors across our state continue to deny that our death penalty system is broken – or they say if there is a problem, it is really a small one and we can fix it somehow. It is difficult to see how the system can be fixed when not a single one of the new reforms proposed by my Capital Punishment Commission has been adopted. Even the reforms the prosecutors agree with haven’t been adopted.

So when will the system be fixed? How much more risk can we afford? Will we actually have to execute an innocent person before the tragedy that is our capital punishment system in Illinois is really understood? This summer, a United States District court judge held the federal death penalty was unconstitutional and noted that with the number of recent exonerations based on DNA and new scientific technology we, without a doubt, executed innocent people before this technology emerged.

As I prepare to leave office, I had to ask myself whether I could really live with the prospect of knowing that I had the opportunity to act, but that I failed to do so because I might be criticized. Could I take the chance that our capital punishment system might be reformed, that wrongful convictions might not occur, that enterprising journalism students might free more men from death row? A system that’s so fragile that it depends on young journalism students is seriously flawed.

"There is no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending."

That’s what Abraham Lincoln said about the bloody war between the states. It was a war fought to end the sorriest chapter in American history--the institution of slavery. While we are not in a civil war now, we are facing what is shaping up to be one of the great civil rights struggles of our time. Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights has taken the position that the death penalty is being sought with increasing frequency against the poor and minorities.

Our own study showed that juries were more likely to sentence to death if the victim were white than if the victim were black--three-and-a-half times more likely to be exact. We are not alone. Just this month Maryland released a study of their death penalty system and racial disparities exist there too.

This week, Mamie Till Mobley died. Her son Emmett was lynched in Mississippi in the 1950s. She was a strong advocate for civil rights and reconciliation. In fact just three weeks ago, she was the keynote speaker at the Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation event in Chicago. This group opposes the death penalty even though their family members have been lost to senseless killing. Mamie's strength and grace not only ignited the civil rights movement--including inspiring Rosa Parks to refuse to go to the back of the bus--but inspired murder victims' families until her dying day.

Is our system fair to all? Is justice blind? These are important human rights issues, ones that need answers.

Another issue that came up in my individual, case-by-case review was the issue of international law. The Vienna Convention protects U.S. citizens abroad and foreign nationals in the United States. It provides that if you are arrested, you should be afforded the opportunity to contact your consulate. There are five men on death row who were denied that internationally recognized human right. Mexico's President Vicente Fox contacted me to express his deep concern for the Vienna Convention violations. . Based on my Commission’s findings and recommendations, this year I prepared and distributed to police agencies and prosecutors training materials to ensure compliance with the Vienna convention. If we do not uphold international law here, we cannot expect our citizens to be protected outside the United States.

My Commission recommended the Supreme Court conduct a proportionality review of our system in Illinois. While our appellate courts perform a case-by-case review of the appellate record, they have not done such a big picture study. Instead, they tinker with a case-by-case review as each appeal lands on their docket.

In 1994, near the end of his distinguished career on the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an influential dissent in the body of law on capital punishment. 20 years earlier he was part of the court that issued the landmark Furman decision. The Court decided that the death penalty statutes in use throughout the country were fraught with severe flaws that rendered them unconstitutional. Quite frankly, they were the same problems we see here in Illinois. To many, it looked liked the Furman decision meant the end of the death penalty in the United States.

This was not the case. Many states responded to Furman by developing and enacting new and improved death penalty statutes. In 1976, four years after it had decided Furman, Justice Blackmun joined the majority of the United States Supreme Court in deciding to give the States a chance with these new and improved death penalty statutes. There was great optimism in the air.

This was the climate in 1977, when the Illinois legislature was faced with the momentous decision of whether to reinstate the death penalty in Illinois. I was a member of the General Assembly at that time and when I pushed the green button in favor of reinstating the death penalty in this great State, I did so with the belief that whatever problems had plagued the capital punishment system in the past were now being cured. I am sure that most of my colleagues who voted with me that day shared that view.

But 20 years later, after affirming hundreds of death penalty decisions, Justice Blackmun came to the realization, in the twilight of his distinguished career that the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.” He expressed frustration with a 20-year struggle to develop procedural and substantive safeguards. In a now famous dissent he wrote in 1994, " From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

One of the few disappointments of my legislative and executive career is that the General Assembly failed to work with me to reform our deeply flawed system. I don't know why legislators could not heed the rising voices of reform. I don't know how many more systemic flaws we needed to uncover before they would be spurred to action.

Three times I proposed reforming the system with a package that would restrict the use of jailhouse snitches, create a statewide panel to determine death eligible cases, and reduce the number of crimes eligible for death. These reforms would not have created a perfect system, but they would have dramatically reduced the chance for error in the administration of the ultimate penalty.

The Governor has the constitutional role in our state of acting in the interest of justice and fairness. Our state constitution provides broad power to the Governor to issue reprieves, pardons and commutations. Our Supreme Court has reminded inmates petitioning them that while errors and fairness questions may actually exist and cannot recognized under judicial rules and procedural mandates, the last resort for relief is the Governor.

At times the executive clemency power has perhaps been a crutch for courts to avoid making the kind of major change that I believe our system needs.

Our systemic case-by-case review has found more cases of innocent men wrongfully sentenced to death row. Because our three year study has found only more questions about the fairness of the sentencing; because of the spectacular failure to reform the system; because we have seen justice delayed for countless death row inmates with potentially meritorious claims; because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

I cannot say it as eloquently than Justice Blackmun.

The legislature couldn't reform it.

Lawmakers won't repeal it.

But I will not stand for it.

I must act.

Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error—error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. Because of all of these reasons today I am commuting the sentences of all death row inmates.

This is a blanket commutation. I realize it will draw ridicule, scorn and anger from many who oppose this decision. They will say I am usurping the decisions of judges and juries and state legislators. But as I have said, the people of our state have vested in me the power to act in the interest of justice. Even if the exercise of my power becomes my burden I will bear it. Our constitution compels it. I sought this office, and even in my final days of holding it, I cannot shrink from the obligations to justice and fairness that it demands.

There have been many nights where my staff and I have been deprived of sleep in order to conduct our exhaustive review of the system. But I can tell you this: I will sleep well knowing I made the right decision.

As I said when I declared the moratorium, it is time for a rational discussion on the death penalty, here in Illinois and all across America. While our experience in Illinois has indeed sparked a debate, we have fallen short of a rational discussion. Yet if I did not take this action, I feared that there would be no comprehensive and thorough inquiry into the guilt of the individuals on death row or of the fairness of the sentences applied.

To say it plainly one more time- the Illinois capital punishment system is broken. It has taken innocent men to a hair’s breadth escape from their unjust execution. Legislatures past have refused to fix it. Our new legislature and our new Governor must act to rid our state of the shame of threatening the innocent with execution and the guilty with unfairness.

In the days ahead, I will pray that we can open our hearts and provide something for victims' families other than the hope of revenge. Lincoln once said: " I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice." I can only hope, with God’s help, that will be so. God bless you. And God bless the people of Illinois.

Return to Center on Wrongful Convictions Home Page

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

2007-01-21T07:08:00.000-08:00

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle nominated former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous, heroic and principled opposition to the racist and class-based Death Penalty system in America. Due to George Ryan`s continued and proven commitment to seek justice for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, and People of Color in America, he has become one of a handful of courageous voices calling for an end to the repressive political, legal, and social climate that keeps the death penalty alive in this country. George Ryan has performed more effective work against the death penalty than the entire American abolitionist movement put together.

As a consequence he has drawn the vindictive attention of the stridently pro-death penalty U.S. Department of Justice. It is no coincidence that the racist and pro-death penalty U.S. Department of Justice indicted George Ryan for allegedly misappropriating $167,000 over a ten-year period of time soon after he had liberated 167 human beings from the Illinois death row, two-thirds of whom were People of Color. This indictment and persecution were designed to send a message to George Ryan and to the American abolitionist movement that the U.S. Department of Justice will continue to fight its rearguard action against the mortally wounded death penalty system in America. It was Governor George Ryan who inflicted that grievous blow upon the entire American death penalty system. He is now paying a very heavy price for his courage, integrity, and principles. For that reason, he richly deserves to win the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Governor Ryan is one of 191 registered Candidates for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. The name of the recipient will be announced in mid-October 2006.

Professor Boyle may be contacted for comments or interviews at the at the following:

Phone: 1-217-333-7954

Fax: 1-217-244-1478

Email: committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org

Website: http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org

Visit our web site for complete information about Ryan’s work

and our campaign to support him.

Italy Foreign Min: EU Must Urge Global Death-Penalty Halt

2007-01-21T04:34:00.000-08:00

Italy Foreign Min: EU Must Urge Global Death-Penalty Halt

ROME (AP)

Italy's foreign minister will call on E.U. countries later this month to come together to push for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty, the ministry said Friday.

After the Dec. 30 execution of Saddam Hussein, Premier Romano Prodi's center- left-government began a diplomatic push to have the moratorium initiative taken up by the U.N. General Assembly. Past lobbying by Italy for U.N. action against the death penalty has been unsuccessful.

The ministry said Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema would urge E.U. countries at a meeting Jan. 22 to agree on a common strategy to help stop executions around the world.Saddam's execution was denounced virtually across Italy's political spectrum, with former premier and conservative opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi calling the killing a political error and Prodi expressing worry that the hanging would fuel more violence in Iraq.

The gruesome and inadvertent decapitation of Saddam's half-brother when he was hanged two weeks later horrified people worldwide.Italy and all other E.U. countries don't permit capital punishment. However, countries including the U.S., Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China have the death penalty.

GOVERNOR GEORGE RYAN HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR THE 2005 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

2007-01-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – January 14, 2005

GOVERNOR GEORGE RYAN HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR THE 2005 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

On Monday, January 17, 2005 the United States of America will celebrate the annual National Holiday in honor of the late, great and martyred civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

To mark this occasion, University of Illinois College of Law Professor Francis A. Boyle has nominated former Illinois Governor George Ryan for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize because of his courageous and heroic opposition to the racist death penalty system in America, which differentially targets African Americans. 42% of America's death row population are African Americans. Of those defendants executed in the United States since 1976, 34% were African Americans. Of the 167 persons whom George Ryan liberated from Illinois' racist death row two years ago, about 60% were African Americans.

Illinois proudly boasts that it is "The Land of Lincoln": President Abraham Lincoln, a resident of Illinois, freed the slaves. In the tradition of Lincoln, Governor Ryan freed over 100 descendants of slaves from Illinois' racist death row. As Dr. King's associate the Reverend Jesse Jackson has persuasively argued, today the administration of the Death Penalty in America is nothing more than a system of "Legal Lynching" (1996) against African Americans and other People of Color. The time has long passed for America to eliminate this racist and barbaric measure of state terrorism directed against African Americans, other People of Color, and poor Whites. Toward that end, George Ryan has performed more effective work against the racist death penalty system in America than the entire American Abolitionist Movement combined. For that reason, he richly deserves to win the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. Just as the elimination of slavery in America emanated from "The Land of Lincoln," so too the final elimination of the death penalty from America shall be traced back to George Ryan and the State of Illinois.

Professor Boyle may be contacted for comments or interviews at the following:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)

fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Website: http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org/

Ohio: Dianne Abshire – Phone: 419-523-5816 Fax 1-419-538-7273
Germany:Britta Slopianka – Phone: 4193-888-359 . Fax: 4193-888-617
Norway: Sissel Egeland – Phone 47 98622499. Fax: 1-813-354-4809

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- DECEMBER 16, 2003

GEORGE H. RYAN TO BE NOMINATED FOR THE

2004 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

As the deadline approaches for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize nominations,
Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law and Human Rights at

the University of Illinois, has decided to re-nominate ex Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois.

Professor Boyle nominated Ryan last year and explains

his decision to nominate him again as follows.

"Since retiring as Illinois Governor, George Ryan has launched a one-man crusade

all over the world against the death penalty.

He has probably done more effective work against the death penalty than

all the rest of the American Abolitionists put together"

states Professor Boyle.

After three years of thorough review of all capital cases in his State, George Ryan

declared the capital punishment system

in Illinois "broken", and commuted the sentences of all 167 inmates sitting on

Death Row in Illinois jails on January 11th, 2003.

Since then he has been actively campaigning in the United States and in Europe in

an attempt to bring the use of the death penalty

in the USA to an end.

The Death Penalty is a system, which cannot be fixed. It is broken and flawed.

Human justice will never be infallible.

Ryan has been appointing Honorary Chairman of the European activist group,

Hands off Cain.

In this capacity he lead the campaign

to have the European Parliament petition the United Nations to pass a resolution

demanding that the US stop using Capital Punishment.

Capital Punishment is contrary to all International Human Rights codes

and the USA is the only Western Liberal Democracy

still practicing this Human Rights violation.

The USA kills more of their own citizens in the name of justice than any other country

in the world with the exception of China and Iran.

That fact notwithstanding, the task of bringing this practice

to an end in USA is enormous.

The Campaign to Support George Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize believes

that international support would be an important aid

to help Ryan continue his fight to end the Death Penalty.

George Ryan has shown courage and strength in his continuing struggle.

It is commonly rumored that he was among

the top hand full of finalists for the 2003 award, which was won

by Shirin Ebadi of Iran.

With our support we trust that 2004 will be the year that George Ryan

wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

And the USA is given one more message that

the rest of the democratic world abhors capital punishment.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

To download this English Language press release in MS Word format, please click here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – October 7, 2003

Nobel Nominee George Ryan active in Europe

George Ryan who is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded on Friday Oct 10 2003 has been active recently in Europe assisting the abolitionist activist group known as Hands Off Cain to support and promote a resolution to the United Nations calling for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the Death Penalty.

Here is the information from the Hands Off Cain (HOC) web site:

September 30, 2003: the European mission conducted by former governor of Illinois and current Hands Off Cain Honorary President George Ryan, together with Leroy Orange, ex death row inmate who is alive thanks to the moratorium on executions introduced by the governor in his state, came to an end on Monday in Brussels.

In the morning an HOC delegation consisting of President Marco Pannella, Secretary Sergio D’Elia, Treasurer Elisabetta Zamparutti, Board Member Anna Zammit, together with Ryan and Orange, met with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini just before the commencement of the EU General Affairs Council meeting he was to preside over. On the agenda was the European Parliament and Italian Presidency’s proposal of presenting, at the ongoing UN General Assembly, a resolution in favour of a universal moratorium on capital executions.

The HOC delegation later met the President of the European Commission Romano Prodi, who gave his support towards Hands Off Cain’s campaign.

“Putting an end to the death penalty is not only an act of prudence, but also one of wisdom,” Prodi said at the end of the meeting.

In the evening Ryan and Orange participated at a conference held at the European Parliament which saw the presentation of the English edition of Hands Off Cain’s 2003 Report: The Death Penalty Worldwide, and the launch of an online signature campaign, aimed at EU Parliamentarians, for a universal moratorium on capital executions.

Both initiatives were sponsored by the European Union.

More information is available on the HOC web site at http://www.handsoffcain.org/. For local information or interviews contact Prof Francis A. Boyle at:

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

To download this English Language press release in PDF format, please click here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – October 2, 2003

Former Gov. Ryan mentioned as possible finalist for Nobel Peace Prize

An Associated Press story out of Oslo Norway reports the following:

“Nobel watchers say there is no clear favorite for this year's prize, but some names bandied about include Pope John Paul II, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Another is former Illinois Gov. George Ryan for emptying his state's death row of 167 inmates.”

George H. Ryan was nominated by Professor Francis Boyle for this years Nobel Peace prize.

The Campaign to support the nomination of George H. Ryan for the Nobel peace prize has collected over 1000 signatures of support from Americans and people around the world on their web site. This document has been filed with the Nobel Peace Prize committee. The list of supporters and their comments are available at
http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org/supporters.html.

This weekend at an NAACP conference in Chicago, former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois will receive the prestigious NAACP Humanitarian Award.

Ex Governor Ryan has just returned from a human rights tour of Europe with Hands Off Cain, an abolitionist and human rights action group. Leroy Orange, an innocent man whose confession obtained by torture put him on death row, has been accompanying Ryan. Orange was one of the four inmates set free by Ryan. Ryan and the group held talks with European leaders and the UN who are seeking to have the USA and Japan establish moratorium against the death penalty.

Ryan has travelled and done extensive public speaking since he left office, which has continued to focus attention of the problems with the death Penalty in the US.

Dr. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law and a member of the committee to support Ryan’s Nobel peace Prize nomination is available for comments or interviews. He can be reached at:

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

To download this English Language press release in PDF format, please click here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -

January 17, 2003

BY THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT THE NOMINATION OF GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Ryan's Nobel Nomination Completed and Filed

January 16, 2003: It is official: George Ryan is now a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Francis A. Boyle announced "I have today filed the Nomination by fax with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway. StopCapitalPunishment.org will now focus its efforts on promoting and lobbying on behalf of Governor Ryan to be awarded the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize."

Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, a member of the Campaign to nominate George H. Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize made good on his promise by completing and filing the nomination papers recommending ex Governor Ryan of Illinois for the Nobel Peace Prize late yesterday.

Professor Boyle noted that "By exposing the inhumanity of capital punishment in the United States, George H. Ryan has, in the words of Alfred Nobel, "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.""

The reasons to which Boyle referred are well documented and many. The highlights are the moratorium on the death penalty that Ryan declared in 2000, culminating with his courageous and historic exonerations of January 10th and the commutation of all the remaining Illinois death row prisoner's sentences on January 11th, just two days before he officially left office.

Ryan's actions have been the subject of both praise and bitter attack. But one thing is certain; the future of the Death Penalty in the United States has been irrevocably changed. George W. Bush who presided over the execution of more people in Texas than any other Governor in history - 156 souls by actual count - was rarely questioned about this in his run for the Presidency. In the aftermath of George Ryan's groundbreaking action it is hard to imagine this ever happening again.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Rick Halperin
Human Rights; History Professor, Southern Methodist University, Dallas,
Texas; Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1989-1995, Board
Chair, 1992-93); President, Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death
Penalty (2000-present)
SMU PO Box 750172
Dallas, Texas 75275
Phone: 214-768-3284
Fax: 214-768-3475
rhalperi@mail.smu.edu

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

To download this English Language press release in PDF format, please click here.
To download a French Language version in PDF format, please click here.
To download a German Language version in PDF format, please click here.
To download an Italian Language version in PDF format, please click here.
To download a Swedish Language version in PDF format, please click here.

7
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - January 14, 2003
BY THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT THE NOMINATION OF GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Ryan Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - The Canadian Connection

On December 19 the decision was made by Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois to nominate the then Governor of Illinois, George H. Ryan for the Nobel peace Prize in recognition of his courageous and ground breaking work on the death penalty. Governor Ryan was scheduled to leave office on January 13, 2003. There was much speculation about whether or not he would exercise his constitutional prerogative and exonerate or commute the sentences of any of the inmates on death row in Illinois.
While the decision had been made to nominate Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize regardless of what he did upon leaving office it was hoped that the campaign would support and encouragement for him to issue a blanket clemency order.

The question was how could the campaign have any impact in such a short time period? The answer appeared to be electronically via the Internet. Bob Wakfer, a human rights activist and life long abolitionist and president of Computer Partners, a Waterloo Ontario web design and web hosting company had the solution. With the assistance of his web master, Marcel Penton a web site was created between 1:00 and 5:00 pm on Christmas Eve.

An ad hoc team of volunteer from around the world was assembled with strong representation from Norway, France, Germany and Italy. A series of Press Releases was immediately distributed by email to media outlets around the world. The first mention of the Campaign and the pending Nomination of Governor Ryan appeared in the State Journal Of Springfield Illinois January 1, 2003. Since then Professor Boyle has given a series of almost non-stop interviews on radio, TV and to newspaper reporters.

The web site, which can be found at http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org/ is the heart of this campaign. The press releases have been translated in German, French and Italian and are available for download below. A supporter's page was established, and to date over 600 people from around the world have signed up to indicate their support for Governor Ryan and his nomination.

Links to much of the press coverage can be found on the web site and the full transcript of Ryan's speech in which he commuted the sentences of 167 Death Row inmates is available in English, French and German by clicking here.

This campaign has only been possible thought the use of the Internet and electronic communication. And this has all been made possible by the Canadian connection.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

To download this English Language press release in PDF format, please click here.
To download a German Language version in PDF format, please click here.

6
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – January 12, 2003
BY THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT THE NOMINATION OF GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

In the Land of Lincoln Governor Ryan Is a Nobel Successor!

In a much-anticipated speech Saturday, Gov. George H. Ryan today commuted the sentences of all 167 men on Illinois Death Row.

Despite much criticism in the United States, the international media, foreign governments, abolitionists and people around the world are praising the governor’s action as historical, ground breaking and above all courageous. The hope of much of the rest of the world is that Governor Ryan's speech, may signal the beginning of the end for the Death Penalty in the United States.

Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois will nominate Gov. Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has discussed the Governor's courage and commitment to justice in several media interviews over the past week. Professor Boyle has issued the following statement:

"As a long-time abolitionist I must state in all honesty that during the past three years Illinois Governor George Ryan has done more effective work against the death penalty than all of us American abolitionists put together. That is precisely why I am going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize as soon as we can put the nomination papers together."

Francis A. Boyle
Professor of International Law
Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92)

Ryan’s three years of activism, concluding as it has with the exoneration and blanket clemency decisions of the last couple of days places him in a unique and special category as a fighter for civil and human rights, justice and equality. We at http://www.StopCapitalPunishment.org believe that he is an outstanding candidate to be awarded a Nobel Laureate. It is our intention to promote him, support him and lobby for him until the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.

We invite all like-minded people to join us in this pursuit.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

To download this English Language press release in PDF format, please click here.
To download a German Language version in PDF format, please click here.
To download a French Language version in PDF format, please click here.

5
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - January 9, 2003
BY THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT THE NOMINATION OF GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Death Penalty-Fighting Gov Deserves Nobel

New York Newsday, New York, NY
Sheryl McCarthy

Newsday, a major daily of the New York Metro area, published an article today supporting the nomination of Gov. George Ryan of Illinois for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ms. Sheryl McCarthy of Newsday wrote: "Ryan caused a nationwide stir in January 2000, when he put a halt to executions in Illinois until the state could study how they were being administered. The reason? Illinois had exonerated more death row inmates in the 23 years since capital punishment became legal again than it had executed. "Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate," Ryan declared."
Professor Francis Boyle told the author yesterday (Jan. 8th) that "George Ryan has done more to stop the death penalty here in the United States in the last three years than all of us abolitionists put together. It's Gov. Ryan, a conservative Republican, who has opened up this debate." A committee headed by the University of Illinois law professor says it plans to nominate Illinois Gov. George Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize this year because of his "heroic" and "principled" stand on the death penalty.
"Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate," Ryan declared in January 2000, when he declared a moratorium on executions in Illinois.
Ms. McCarthy states: "Gov. Ryan's decision was gutsy, especially since he doesn't oppose the death penalty on its face - just the application of it in a classist, racist way that gives a fair shake only to those who can afford to hire good lawyers. Illinois' moratorium made people all over the country take another look at how the death penalty was being applied. Whatever he decides, he's already taken a giant step toward eliminating the death penalty - an archaic, inhumane and capricious punishment in the world's most powerful country. Lots of people have won prizes for doing less."

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

4
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - January 9, 2003
BY THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT THE NOMINATION OF GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Pope issues Plea to Governor Ryan for Blanket Clemency

Apostolic Nunciature
United States of America
22 August 2002
N. 15997/3424
Dear Governor Ryan,
I am writing to you as the Official Representative of His Holiness, Pope John Paul II here in the United States of America. The Holy Father has happily noted that you have declared a moratorium on the executions of inmates on death row in the State of Illinois. For this, He is most grateful and would like to express His heartfelt support and blessings. The moratorium on the executions is a very positive step towards a culture of life and of non-violence. I am sure you are aware of the Holy Father's commitment to upholding the sacredness and dignity of each human life, from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death. For this reason He has made many appeals to Heads of Governments, particularly in the United States, for the eventual abolition of the death penalty. The Holy Father would therefore like to ask you to take another step in the defense of life by commuting all death sentences into life in prison without the possibility of parole within the State of Illinois. It is my sincere hope that you will give need to this urgent petition. Before I conclude, I would like to humbly include my personal greetings and I assure you of my prayers, for you, for your family and for the exercise of your important responsibilities.
Respectfully and truly yours,
[Signed]
Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo
Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

3
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - January 6, 2003

Web Site created and launched to support an International Campaign to Nominate Governor Ryan for Nobel Peace Prize. See http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, December 24, 2002, a web site was launched as the communication center and focal point of this worldwide campaign. This campaign may be unique because to date none of the committee or volunteers has met face to face. The campaign has been planned and run exclusively via email and other Internet technologies. The web site is the voluntary contribution of Bob Wakfer, a Canadian, and is maintained by Wakfer and other members of his staff in Waterloo Ontario.

This International Campaign and the Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize is the Brain Child of Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign and a member of the Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92). Professor Boyle conceived the idea upon attending a speech against the death penalty given by Governor George H. Ryan on Dec. 19 at his Law School. The idea for the campaign was presented to a small but international group of abolitionist volunteers who started work immediately.

The Campaign's first Press Release was posted on the web site on December 31. The volunteers emailed copies of the press release to media outlets in the US and around the World. The Press Release has been translated into German, French and Italian and these versions as well as the original English are available for electronic download below. Click here to view. Interviews and news stories started immediately. Links to the Internet copies of these stories are posted to the site daily.

In addition a Supporters Sign Up page was placed on the site. People are invited to show their support for this campaign by leaving their names and addresses and a message of support if they wish. People from all over the World as well as the United States have indicated their support both for the Campaign and for Blanket Clemency for the inmates of Death Row in Illinois. There are supporters from Great Britain and virtually every European country as well as from Canada and the United States. One of the more notable supporters to sign up is Mike Farrell, of M*A*S*H fame. To date more than 200 people have taken the time to indicate their support on the web site.

After only 12 days the site has had more than 1100 unique visitors from 31 different countries.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

2
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - DECEMBER 31, 2002
BY THE CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT THE NOMINATION OF GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN FOR THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Contact: mailto:committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org

George H. Ryan to be nominated by Campaign Committee Member Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois. Press conference to be held at the Illinois State Capitol Press Room on Monday, January 6, 2003, at 1 P.M.

As the January 13, 2003 deadline approaches an international campaign has begun to nominate Gov. George Ryan of Illinois for the Nobel Peace Prize. Gov. Ryan known for his imposition of a moratorium of the death penalty in Illinois has been lauded for his courage and public outrage at the number of wrongful capital convictions in his state.

Francis Boyle, professor of International Law at the Univ. of Chicago, Champaign, said "As a Professor of International Law and Human Rights, I will nominate Illinois Governor George Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his principled and courageous opposition to the racist and class-based death penalty system that we have here in the State of Illinois, the Land of Abraham Lincoln. George Ryan is a worthy successor."

Professor Boyle will officially nominate Gov. Ryan for the prize.

Katie Williams, an American member of the Campaign to support the Nomination of Governor George H. Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize, stresses the courage that it took to impose the moratorium and the additional commitment to justice that it will take to commute the sentences of those on Illinois' death row. "The struggle to abolish the death penalty in America is a fight that has been fought for many years and on many fronts. Gov. Ryan's courage in confronting the inequities in the imposition of the death penalty and his sincere desire to see justice done for all in the state of Illinois is a beacon of hope."

In Norway Sissel Egeland urges Scandinavians to stay updated about the enormous personal effort Governor Ryan has made to end the flaws in the death penalty system to secure that innocent persons will not be executed. "The moratorium has inspired Americans to end the inhuman death penalty system and to join the rest of the world in the care for human rights and justice. A nomination of Governor Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize will send an important message to the international society that the use of the death penalty shall now be ancient history and unite Europeans and courageous Americans to stand up for ethics and human rights in all international relations."

Prior to the Illinois General Assembly resuming its work later that afternoon, Professor Boyle will conduct a Press Conference at the Illinois State Capitol Press Room on Monday, January 6, 2003, at 1 P.M. to announce the Nobel Peace Prize Nomination and Campaign for Governor Ryan. Springfield is the Capital of the State of Illinois.

The campaign is supported by a very active web site that can be found at http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org/. The web site is both a resource to anyone wanting to know more about Governor Ryan's achievements and a bulletin board for all the latest developments in the campaign. Press releases and other resources for the media and press will be available there. It is interesting to note that although the site has only been available on the Internet since late on Christmas Eve afternoon that at the time of writing -- December 30 at 8:00 pm -- there have already been 100 people who have voluntarily signed up on the web site as supporters of the campaign.

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice)
217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu

Sissel Egeland
Norway
Phone: 47- 51587350 ( Norway )
Fax: 1-813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from Europe
Fax : 813-354-4809 ( Florida ) from US
denmark@online.no

Katie Williams
2 Boiceville Rd
Brooktondale, NY 14817
Phone: 607-539-7537
kaw34@CORNELL.EDU

Bob Wakfer
105 Greenbrier Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
Phone: 519-746-1607
Fax : 519-746-7566
bob@compar.com

You can also contact us at committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org.

1
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., and families of Inmates on Illinois
Death Row Visit the Pontiac Correctional Center in Pontiac, Illinois
on New Year's Eve

(Chicago, IL, December 30, 2002) Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.,
founder and president of The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, together with
family members of Death Row Inmates, and a delegation of death
penalty activists will visit inmates convicted under Illinois capital
punishment laws on the last day of the year.

Illinois Governor George Ryan brought heightened awareness to the
issue of disparities in the convictions, sentences, and execution of
the death penalty in America when he set a moratorium on the
implementation of the death penalty within the state. In Illinois, 13
men sentenced to death were found to be wrongfully convicted.
Reverend Jackson and the delegation are calling for Governor Ryan to
grant clemency to all Illinois Death Row inmates prior to leaving
office on January 13, 2002.

"The reality is that the death penalty is a human rights issue," said
Rev. Jackson. "Unlike other less civilized‚ nations, the United
States maintains a system of legal lynching, notwithstanding the
mental condition of the convicted, or the adequacy of legal
representation afforded the accused. America braggadociously boasts
of moral authority, yet a glaring chink in the American armor is the
death penalty."

Joining Reverend Jackson will be Alice Kim and Marlene Martin of the
Campaign to End the Death Penalty and Rob Warden of Northwestern
University's Center on Wrongful Convictions. The delegation will meet
with Illinois Death Row inmates, including the "Death Row 10," a
group of African American men tortured by former Chicago Police
Commander Jon Burge and his detectives.

Reverend Jackson and the delegation will arrive at Pontiac at 11:00
AM. Following the visit, there will be a press conference, outside
the front gate of the Correctional Center, beginning at 12:30 PM.

GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN TO BE NOMINATED FOR THE 2004 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

2007-01-20T13:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.thenobelpeaceprizetoryan.com/Ryan2004.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – December 16, 2003

GOVERNOR GEORGE H. RYAN TO BE NOMINATED FOR
THE 2004 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

As the deadline approaches for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize nominations, Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Illinois, has decided to re-nominate ex Governor George H. Ryan of Illinois. Professor Boyle nominated Ryan last year and explains his decision to nominate him again as follows.

"Since retiring as Illinois Governor, George Ryan has launched a one-made crusade all over the world against the death penalty. He has probably done more effective work against the death penalty than all the rest of the American Abolitionists put together" states Professor Boyle.

After three years of thorough review of all capital cases in his State, George Ryan declared the capital punishment system in Illinois "broken" and commuted the sentences of all 167 inmates sitting on Death Row in Illinois jails on January 11th, 2003.

Since then he has been actively campaigning in the United States and in Europe in an attempt to bring the use of the death penalty in the USA to an end. The Death Penalty is a system, which cannot be fixed. It is broken and flawed. Human justice will never be infallible.

Ryan has been appointing Honorary Chairman of the European activist group, Hands Off Cain. In this capacity he lead the campaign to have the European Parliament petition the United Nations to pass a resolution demanding that the US stop using Capital Punishment.

Capital Punishment is contrary to all International Human Rights codes and the USA is the only major so called democracy still practicing this Human Rights violation. The USA murders more of their own citizens in the name of justice than any other country in the world with the exception of China and Iran.

That fact notwithstanding, the task of bringing this practice to an end in USA is enormous. The Campaign to Support George Ryan for the Nobel Peace Prize believes that international support would be an important aid to help Ryan continue his fight to end the Death Penalty.

George Ryan has shown courage and strength in his continuing struggle. It is commonly rumored that he was among the top hand full of finalists for the 2003 award, which was won by Shirin Ebadi of Iran.

With our support we trust that 2004 will be the year that George Ryan wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And the USA is given one more message that the rest of the democratic world abhors capital punishment.

Professor Boyle may be contacted for comments or interviews at the at the following:

Phone: 1-217-333-7954

Fax: 1-217-244-1478

Email: committee@stopcapitalpunishment.org

Website: http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org

Visit our web site for complete information about Ryan’s work

and our campaign to support him.

Beenden Sie die Todesstrafe jetzt!

2007-01-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

Arreter la Peine de mort Maintenant!

2007-01-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Nobel Peace Prize to George Ryan

2007-01-20T13:09:00.000-08:00