George Ryan Wrote a Book
Former Governor George Ryan, who spent nearly six years in federal prison after a conviction on federal racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax fraud charges, is out with a new book September 18.
UNTIL I COULD BE SURE: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois, is Ryan’s account of his then-controversial decision to issue a moratorium on capital punishment in 2000 and commutation of all 167 pending death penalty convictions in the state to life in prison shortly before leaving office in 2003. The state legislature eventually abolished the death penalty in 2011.
Obviously, one could see Ryan wants the death penalty decisions to remain his legacy, especially by writing this book at the age of 86. It is likely left to the reader’s judgement how to balance his act of political bravery and his acts of corruption that landed him in federal prison.
Ryan’s story is, indeed, a long and complicated one. His rise from a pharmacist in Kankakee to Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives to Lieutenant Governor to Secretary of State to the Governor’s Mansion is hard to imagine in today’s politics.
Ryan’s legacy may well be defined further by this book, though he has mostly avoided the spotlight and comments on his corruption conviction. He told the Sun-Times in 2014 he felt no responsibility for the deaths of six children in an accident caused by a trucker who received a license in Ryan’s “licenses for bribes” scheme in the Secretary of State’s office.
We had a few questions for longtime journalist and writer Maurice Possley, Ryan’s co-author of the book:
Q: Did Gov. Ryan approach you about this book? What was the reason for it?
A: Governor Ryan approached me with a manuscript that he had put together and asked for my opinion. I told him it needed a lot of work--which he had been told by others. I added that I thought he had a tremendous story that should be told and that having been a reporter who covered criminal justice during his tenure as governor, including writing some of the articles that influenced him, I was a good fit to work with him. And so, a collaboration was born.
Q: I think a lot of people are going to hear about a book by the former Governor who went to prison and think "he's just relitigating his corruption conviction." I get the impression from you he isn't doing that here.
A: He is not relitigating his federal case--not at all. This is the story of what he did and how he came to do it as regards the death penalty in Illinois. In fact, the federal case is only addressed in two places: Scott Turow in the foreword and Gov. Ryan in the epilogue. You should read them.
Q: As you've spent time with him in the last chapter of his life, do you think he's remorseful about the things he was convicted of?
A: That's a question for Governor Ryan. I think he addresses this pretty well in the epilogue. I will let that speak for itself.
Here is an excerpt from the book Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois by George H. Ryan Sr. – with Maurice Possley. Used by permission of the publisher Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved:
On January 11, 1999, I was sworn in as the 39th governor of the state of Illinois along with other constitutional officers. That afternoon, Lura Lynn and I along with my Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood and her husband, Paul, held an open house at the Executive Mansion. The inaugural ball was held at the Prairie Capital Convention Center just a few blocks from the Capital. It was a grand affair.
My true education about the death penalty began early in the day, before I had uttered the oath of office. That very morning, the Chicago Tribune newspaper published the first part of a five-part series on prosecutorial misconduct, titled “Trial & Error—The Verdict: Dishonor.”
The series, written by reporters Ken Armstrong and Maurice Possley, described how prosecutors, acting with “impunity,” had committed misconduct in a vast array of cases including “defendants who came within hours of being executed, only to be exonerated.” The first article said they had identified nearly 400 homicide convictions across the nation beginning in 1963—a twenty-five-year period—that had been reversed (and many of them subsequently dismissed) because prosecutors had either failed to disclose evidence of a defendant’s innocence or knowingly used false evidence.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has declared such misconduct by prosecutors to be so reprehensible that it warrants criminal charges and disbarment,” the article said. “But not one of those prosecutors was convicted of a crime. Not one was barred from practicing law. Instead, many saw their careers advance, becoming judges or district attorneys. One became a congressman.”
A total of sixty-seven of these defendants had been sentenced to death and ultimately thirty of them were freed.
Illinois had the second most—forty-six—of these erroneous convictions. Only New York had more, partly because the state had a rule that lessened restrictions on reversals.
The newspaper also documented 326 convictions in all manner of cases—not just homicides—that had been reversed in the state of Illinois, including 207 in Illinois since December 31, 1977. Nearly half of the Cook County reversals were in homicide cases. The numbers were startling to me. One statement was particularly jarring: “As a result, about once a month, on average, for the past two decades, a conviction has been set aside in Cook County because of a judicial finding of improper conduct by prosecutors.” The series identified the prosecutors whose conduct had been the subject of the judicial rulings and discovered that many had gone on to be judges or elected to public office. The newspaper said that discipline for the misconduct was rarely imposed.
But death penalty news wasn’t just happening in Chicago. On January 27, 1999, Pope John Paul II was in St. Louis, Missouri, a state that strongly embraced the death penalty. During his homily at the Papal Mass, the Pope declared, “I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.”
And later that day, at a prayer service at the St. Louis Cathedral, the Pope walked over to Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, a Southern Baptist and staunch supporter of the death penalty. The Pope asked Carnahan to “show mercy” to Darrell Mease, who was scheduled to be executed by the state of Missouri on February 10 for a triple murder committed in 1988. Carnahan, who had signed off on 26 prior executions since taking office in 1993, listened to the Pope’s request and commuted Mease’s sentence to life in prison without parole.
Neither of these events, however prepared me for what happened on February 5, 1999. That night, I was stunned to my core.
Lura Lynn and I were in the Executive Mansion and turned on the 6 p.m. Chicago news. I watched in amazement as Anthony Porter, an Illinois Death Row inmate, walked out of Cook County Jail and into the embrace of David Protess, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Arrested in 1982 and convicted and sentenced to death in 1983 for a double murder on Chicago’s South Side, Porter was freed following an investigation by Protess’s journalism students. During their investigation, a man named Alstory Simon confessed on videotape that he committed the crime. Simon said that he shot eighteen-year-old Jerry Hillard in self-defense and didn’t mean to kill nineteen-year-old Marilyn Green.
Journalism students! WOW!
I listened in stunned silence as the report continued. Porter was said to have an IQ of fifty-one and had been two days away from being executed in September 1998—while I was still on the campaign trail—when his lawyer, Daniel Sanders, persuaded the Illinois Supreme Court to issue a stay of the execution to that Porter could have a mental competency hearing. That delay gave the students time to finish their investigative work and to get the confession from Simon that he committed the crime. Porter had been so close to execution that his family had picked out the suit to bury him in, he had been measured for his state-issued coffin and he had filled out the menu for his last meal.
“How does this happen in America?” I said aloud. “What is going on that journalism students—not the courts, not a jury, not a prosecutor—got to the bottom of this? What is wrong with a system that allows somebody to get sentenced to death and spend sixteen years in Death Row and then someone finds out they are innocent?”
The next day, I called Protess’s home number and left a message with his son, Ben. That night, when Protess called me back at the Mansion, he joked that at first, he thought his son was playing a prank until Ben assured him that he recognized my voice.
“How can I help you?” Protess asked me.
“I want to help Anthony Porter,” I told him. “What can I do to help that poor guy?”
I explained that I had been watching the news on television when I saw the report about Porter being freed and that I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help him.
Protess explained that if I granted Porter a gubernatorial pardon, it would speed up the process for Porter to obtain state compensation for his years in prison. I told him that I would do whatever it took to get it done as soon as possible within the bureaucracy that existed. (Porter later was awarded $145,875 in compensation as a result of the pardon.)
As I talked with Protess, I admitted that I had been a lifelong supporter of the death penalty, but watching Porter’s release and learning how close he had come to being executed had caused something inside me to shift.
You can order Ryan’s book on Amazon.
