Washington Post

Monday, January 31, 2000

Illinois Governor to Halt Executions

By William Claiborne

CHICAGO, Jan. 30 -- Gov. George H. Ryan (R) has decided to effectively impose a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois until an inquiry has been conducted into why more death row inmates have been exonerated than executed since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977.

A senior aide to the governor said Ryan will announce on Monday that he plans to block executions by granting stays before any scheduled lethal injections are administered, a move that would keep condemned prisoners under the death sentence but would indefinitely postpone their execution.

"There are innumerable opportunities along the way for serious errors, and the governor wants to take a pause here," Ryan's press secretary, Dennis Culloton, said today. "He wants to be absolutely sure the system is working and that only the clearly guilty are being executed."

Culloton said Ryan is convinced the death penalty system in Illinois is "fraught with errors" and "broken" and should be suspended until thoroughly investigated. Since capital punishment was reinstated 23 years ago, 13 death row inmates have been cleared of murder charges, compared to 12 who have been put to death. Some of the 13 inmates were taken off death row after DNA evidence exonerated them; the cases of others collapsed after new trials were ordered by appellate courts.

One inmate, Anthony Porter, spent 15 years on death row and at one point came within two days of being executed before a group of student journalists at Northwestern University uncovered evidence that was used to prove his innocence. Porter was released from prison last year.

Ryan's decision would make Illinois the first of the 38 states with capital punishment to halt all executions while it reviews its death penalty procedures. The Nebraska legislature passed a moratorium on executions last year but it was vetoed by Gov. Mike Johanns (R).

Ryan did not declare a general moratorium, Culloton said, but will stay executions on a case-by-case basis. He said that if Attorney General Jim Ryan (R) put forward a death warrant and scheduled an execution date, "the governor will just stay that indefinitely." Culloton said he believes the attorney general shares Ryan's doubts and might not even schedule any more executions.

Culloton said the governor "still believes capital punishment is a proper societal response," but was deeply troubled by the number of condemned prisoners who have been exonerated in Illinois in recent years and by a recent series by the Chicago Tribune that examined nearly 300 death penalty cases since 1977.

The newspaper reported that 33 death row inmates had been represented at trial by attorneys who had been disbarred or suspended and that about half of the state's capital cases had been reversed for a new trial or sentencing hearing. The Tribune also reported that in 46 cases, prosecutors had used testimony from jailhouse informants, which is widely believed to be the least reliable evidence in criminal cases.

Last month, Cook County prosecutors dropped charges against a former Chicago police officer who had been sentenced to death largely on the testimony of a jailhouse informant. However, the former policeman faces kidnapping charges in Missouri in an unrelated case.

Last week a Chicago-Kent College Law School professor and his students filed a motion in state Supreme Court asserting that they had uncovered evidence that a death row inmate was wrongfully convicted of a 1982 murder on testimony by witnesses who now say Chicago police detectives coerced them into falsely identifying the suspect as the killer. The commander of the detective squad was fired in 1993 for allegedly directing the torture of several suspects, who made confessions to murder charges that were proved to be false.

Culloton said Ryan will appoint a special commission to study the state's capital punishment system in general and specifically determine what happened in the 13 cases in which defendants were found to have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes.

"The Porter case is a very good example. Porter and the cumulative effects of the system breaking down is what convinced him to just put things on hold," Culloton said. "The governor bears the burden of having the last say, and there's no margin for error."

Since becoming governor a year ago, Ryan has faced only one decision in a death sentence case. He decided not to block the March 1999 execution of a man condemned for a mutilation murder and he later said he agonized over the decision. However, his fellow Republicans have generally favored capital punishment, and Ryan is Illinois campaign chairman for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, whose state executes more people than any other.

The Illinois House of Representatives approved a moratorium on executions last year but it failed in the Republican-controlled Senate.