CHICAGO — Illinois Gov. George Ryan said he unintentionally misled the families and friends of those slain by Death Row murderers when he told them he was leaning away from a blanket clemency.
That was the position he shared with more than 100 victims’ family members at a December meeting. In a speech Saturday, he said that as recent as a week ago he thought he would not grant mercy to every Death Row inmate. But then, he said, he changed his mind.
“They have a right to feel betrayed,” he said in an interview after his speech, blaming his own vacillation. “I have probably misled them, certainly not intentionally. … I apologize to those people.”
Many friends and family members of murder victims did not accept that apology. They said they believe Ryan had intended from the start to pardon or commute the sentence of every condemned prisoner, and that the move was designed to divert attention from his administration’s corruption scandals.
“I just think it’s political tactics,” said Helen Sophie Rajca of Bolingbrook, Ill., whose two brothers were stabbed and shot to death in 1979. “It’s not right what he did. … This is just to blindside everybody from what he’s done.”
On Saturday, Ryan declared the state’s capital punishment system “haunted by the demon of error” and commuted the sentences of every inmate on Illinois’ Death Row.
With two days left as governor, Ryan declared that most of the state’s 156 condemned prisoners will now serve terms of life in prison without parole. Three Death Row inmates, whose cases Ryan said raised particular fairness concerns, were granted 40-year prison terms, allowing the possibility of release in several years. And 12 additional people — who had once been sentenced to Death Row but are awaiting new sentencings — will receive life in prison without parole.
“Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious — and therefore immoral — I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” Ryan said, borrowing the words of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. “I won’t stand for it. … I had to act.”