Former Gov. George Ryan is remembered for two things.
First, that he went to prison after being convicted on corruption charges.
Second, that, in his final days in office, he cleared out death row by
commuting the sentences of everybody in Illinois sentenced to death.
Are the two related? That’s the question taken up
by James L. Merriner, a former Chicago
Sun-Times reporter, in his new book, The Man Who Emptied Death Row: Governor George Ryan and the
Politics of Crime (Southern Illinois University
Press). His answer is “no,” if you mean did Ryan have some
notion that his radical move would save his own skin. But there was a more
subtle connection.
Merriner: “A widespread school of thought holds
that Ryan’s moratorium [on the death penalty], pardons, and blanket
commutation sought three things: first, applause from liberals, especially
the liberal news media. . . ; second, approval from the electorate; and
third, at least grudging admiration from prosecutors because Ryan displayed
moral courage.”
None of these points hold up, Merriner writes.
Liberals couldn’t influence the U.S. attorney going after Ryan. The
electorate generally favors the death penalty, and besides, when he emptied
death row Ryan had retired from politics and didn’t care what voters
thought. Prosecutors tend to support the death penalty, too. Might he have
been trying to influence potential jurors who would eventually decide his
fate? No, because “Ryan was convinced he was innocent and thus had no
need to snooker a jury.”
But, the author suggests, Ryan came to identify with
the condemned. In his review of death penalty cases, Ryan saw the injustice
done by overzealous prosecutors. The author speculates that Ryan may have
been thinking: “Prosecutors sent some innocent people to death row.
Now they want to send me, an innocent man, to jail.”
Of course Ryan wasn’t an innocent man. He just
thought he was. How could he think that? Partly because, Merriner says,
Illinois is one of the three most corrupt states in the nation, along with
New Jersey and Louisiana. After receiving his political education in a
“culture of corruption,” Ryan saw what he did as no different
from what others did. He never thought somebody would come along and change
the rules, or enforce the laws, like U. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald did.
So if he didn’t think what he did was wrong, is
that an indication that Ryan was unfairly prosecuted and wrongly convicted?
Have we criminalized politics?
No. “The stuff that we are charging is stuff
that third-graders know is wrong,” said Patrick Collins, the chief
prosecutor. Stuff like this: Harry Klein owned a villa in Jamaica, where
Ryan liked to go for vacations. Klein usually charged lodgers $1,000 a
week, so Ryan wrote Klein checks for $1,000, then Klein gave the money back
to Ryan in cash. Collins: “As a prosecutor, when you get somebody
falsifying information, that’s your bread and butter to show the jury
that they knew what they were doing is wrong.”
It turns out, according to the book, that Ryan had a
history of wheeling and self-dealing. One incident occurred in 1982, when
he was running for lieutenant governor on a ticket with Jim Thompson. The
operator of a nursing home in Kankakee stopped doing business with the Ryan
family pharmacy, and soon found himself being accused of mistreating
patients. Ryan arranged a meeting, got the charges dropped, and regained
the nursing home’s pharmacy business, worth about $60,000 a year.
There were several other public scandals over the years, all recounted in
the book. Together they should have disqualified him from higher office
long ago.
It’s painful to read all this recent history
that so many of us lived through. What is wrong with Illinois, that it
allowed this guy to rise to power? And how did it happen again, with his
successor? Where were the good guys, like Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar and
Dick Durbin? Where were the media? Where was Illinois
Times? We made an attempt to go after Ryan
early on, but failed to sustain it. If Illinois manages to send Barack
Obama to the White House but does nothing to correct our standing as one of
the three most corrupt states in the nation, we have no right to be proud.
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2008.
