Death penalty opponents expect good news from Illinois governor

CHICAGO -- Capital punishment opponents are hoping for good news today and Saturday when Gov. George Ryan makes two highly anticipated appearances at law schools that have been working to free death row inmates.

"I don't think he would come and give a speech that was going to greatly disappoint us," Rob Warden, executive director of the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, said of Ryan's speech Saturday at Northwestern's law school.

Ryan leaves office at noon Monday, and he has said he will announce by the end of his term whether he will grant clemency to any or all of the state's 160 death row inmates. The speeches are expected to cap Ryan's three-year campaign to highlight flaws in the state's death penalty system, which began when he declared a moratorium on executions in January 2000.

Ryan's suggestion last year that he might grant blanket clemency to every death row inmate prompted nearly all of them to seek mercy. That led to a widely criticized series of hearings in the fall that replayed some of the state's most gruesome murders. After the hearings, Ryan said he was no longer inclined to grant blanket clemency.

Expecting more

But in recent weeks Ryan has twice announced pardons of wrongfully convicted people who were no longer in jail, and his choice of venues for the speeches has death penalty opponents expecting more clemency announcements.

Friday's speech at DePaul University is home to an anti-death penalty center founded by Andrea Lyon, a lawyer who is seeking a pardon for death row inmate Madison Hobley.

For Ryan, the choice of Northwestern for the final chapter of the debate over capital punishment during his administration is a symbolic one.

If there is an epicenter of the anti-death penalty movement in Illinois it is Northwestern. Not only has the law school led the attack on the state's system of capital punishment and its attorneys fought on behalf of individual inmates, but Northwestern journalism students have conducted investigations that freed a handful of inmates.

Even as a corruption scandal plagued his administration and continued to creep closer and closer to him, Ryan, who has not sought re-election, could always count on a warm welcome at Northwestern.

In November, he received a hero's welcome when he spoke at the law school. After calling the students and teachers whose work uncovered evidence that exonerated some death row inmates, "my heroes," the governor received thunderous applause when he announced he'd granted a pardon to a woman at the center of the wrongful prosecution of four Chicago men.

But the optimism by death penalty opponents goes beyond Ryan's choice of venues for two speeches.

Some family members of death row inmates and anti-death penalty activists say they've been invited by Ryan to attend one or both of the speeches.

"The governor's office invited me to the speech (Friday) and they're giving me a special seat," said Costella Cannon, the mother of Frank Bounds who died of a heart attack in 1998 while on death row.

And Ryan's own words have others optimistic.

Edwin Colfax, executive director of the Illinois Death Penalty Education Project, said Ryan sounds much more adamant about his opposition to the death penalty than ever before.

"We've been saying all along when one goes through a case-by-case analysis of death row cases drawing the line (between solid and flawed cases) is impossible," he said. "I have perceived in Gov. Ryan's most recent statements that recognition."