Angel Of Death Row Guilty Until Chosen President You Can T Judge A Judge By His Coverage

By Michael Miner

Ryan was addressing the awards dinner of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, describing his personal road to Damascus, the epiphany that led him to declare a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois. The moratorium of course had been big news.

“As a member of the Illinois General Assembly, I vividly remember voting for the death penalty. And I can also remember the debate vividly on the death penalty. During the debate on the death penalty, those of us who supported the death penalty, we were asked by those who opposed it, who would be willing to throw the switch? Would you be willing to throw the switch? It was a sobering question, and I wish now that I could swallow the words of unqualified support for the death penalty that I offered.”

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This was strong language, though from a reporter’s standpoint nothing to hang a story on. “Back in the fall of 1998,” Ryan went on, “when I was still campaigning for governor, Anthony Porter was scheduled to be executed on September 23 of that year. He had ordered his last meal and been fitted for his burial clothes. Mr. Porter had been convicted in the 1982 shooting death of a man and woman in a south-side Chicago park. Two days before he was to die, his lawyers won a last-minute, temporary reprieve based on his IQ.”

Ryan didn’t object categorically to the death penalty itself–an omission noted and regretted by members of his audience. But long before making this speech he’d said and done more than enough for proponents of the death penalty to label him a tool of a cunning strategy to abolish it by making an end run around public opinion.

“I’m a pharmacist from Kankakee. I gotta tell you, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how you can put a person up to die, charge them with a crime that can take their life, and be represented by an unqualified attorney. I don’t understand that at all.”

Afterward, reporter Doug Dobmeyer went up to Ryan and asked, “How widespread do you think the problem of mistakes are in the criminal justice system?”