Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan dies at 91. He halted executions and went to prison for corruption

[ShazzieB]

3. The corruption was digusting, but I will always be grateful to him for one thing.

Note: I am personally opposed to the death penalty for a variety of reasons. I realize those who are in favor of capital punishment may not regard what I am about to say favorably. You are entitled to your opinions. This post reflects my own position. I have no desire to get into any arguments about the pros and cons of the death penalty in this thread.

In January 2000, "Illinois Governor George Ryan appoint­ed a 14-mem­ber Commission on Capital Punishment to close­ly exam­ine Illinois’s death penal­ty, due to concerns about the Illinois cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tems being fraught with error, to the point of having "come close to the ulti­mate night­mare, the state’s tak­ing of innocent life.” At that time, he put in place a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions until the review was com­plet­ed.

Ryan would eventually commute the death sen­tences of all 167 death-row pris­on­ers in Illinois in 2003, after studying each case closely and concluding that too many innocent people were being convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Illinois. Whatever one may think about the death penalty in theory, it was costing the state millions of dollars every year to convict these people, incarcerate them, and fight the appeals that often resulted in sentences being overturned. Ryan didn't like that, and he hated the idea of an innocent person being wrongfully executed. He later detailed the process by whuch he went from being supportive of the death penalty to opposing it in a book titled Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois.

Eliminating the death penalty in Illinois altogether took longer, but legislation to do that was finally passed and signed into law by then Governor Pat Quinn in 2011. When Quinn's Republican successor Bruce Rauner proposed reinstating the death penalty in the state for individuals who kill law enforcement officers or murder two or more people, the General Assembly chose not to act on his proposal, leaving Illinois a capital punishment free state to this day.

This story is a good example of why I feel that the majority of people in this world are not ALL good or ALL bad. Many are mostly one or the other, but "good" people can and do make mistakes while a "bad" person can sometimes do something good. George Ryan did bad things, and he went to prison for his misdeeds. While acknowledging that, I believe he also deserves credit for doing a very good thing that I believe has made this state a better place.