Illinois Governor to Pardon Four on Death Row
CHICAGO, Jan. 9 — Illinois Gov. George Ryan will pardon four death row inmates Friday who had allegedly been beaten into confessing to crimes in the early 1980s that they did not commit, a source involved in the discussions confirmed tonight.
Over the past several months, Ryan (R) has been reviewing the state’s 159 death row cases for possible commutation. Three years ago, he stopped all executions after it was discovered that 13 death row inmates had been wrongly convicted. The governor plans to discuss the cases during speeches Friday and Saturday, and may announce how many of the remaining inmates whose sentences will be commuted from death to life in prison.
While the governor’s office declined last night to confirm or deny the impending pardons, the source said tonight that “there were several cases he thought were so unjust that he needed to address.”
The decision to pardon the four men comes on the heels of unprecedented clemency hearings for every death row inmate that were derided by prosecutors and victims-rights advocates as insensitive to the victims’ families. Many said that Ryan, whose term ends Monday, was trying to divert attention from bribery scandals that have scarred his administration and, in recent weeks, have stopped short of implicating the governor directly.
Ryan, however, has maintained that he was merely trying to do what is right. The death penalty in Illinois was reinstated in 1977.
“It was almost like flipping a coin,” Ryan said after he stopped the executions in January 2000. “You have to remember that out of 25 people sentenced to die in this state, 13 were exonerated and 12 were executed.”
He was the first governor to call for a moratorium on executions because he said the capital punishment system is “fraught with error” and risks executing the innocent. And he ordered a report, issued last fall, that said there was no way to ensure that an innocent person is never put to death under the current system.
The men who will receive pardons are Leroy Orange, Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley and Stanley Howard — four of more than 40 men who were tortured by members of the violent crimes detective unit that former lieutenant Jon Burge ran for more than two decades, the participant in the discussions said.
See the full story at the Washington Post.