Illinois Governor Will Halt Executions Pending Inquiry

Illinois Gov. George H. Ryan 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 today 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 Sunday. “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 and 12 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 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 Republican Gov. Mike Johanns.

Ryan did not declare a general moratorium, Culloton said, but will stay executions on a case-by-case basis. He said that if state Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan puts forward a death warrant and schedules an execution date, “the governor will just stay that indefinitely.” Culloton said he believes the attorney general shares Ryan’s doubts and might not schedule any more executions.

Culloton said the governor, a Republican, “still believes capital punishment is a proper societal response” but is 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 about half the state’s capital cases had been reversed for a new trial or sentencing hearing. The Tribune reported that in 46 cases, prosecutors had used testimony from jailhouse informants.

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. 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 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.