A Matter of Life and Death

When the death penalty finally had a name, Andrew Kokoraleis, and a face, squared-jawed and olive-skinned, George Ryan’s nearly three decades of preparation deserted him.

The Illinois governor had been in politics most of his adult life, and as a legislator had voted to reinstate capital punishment. He then helped shape the state’s death penalty system, and campaigned time and again on the conservative Republican platform of law and order and the ultimate punishment for criminals such as Kokoraleis, a mutilation murderer.

In March 1999, though, the facade of infallibility surrounding the death penalty system was peeling away like shoddy siding. And in the midst of its startling collapse Ryan, governor for just 2 1/2 months, had to decide whether a subject of this system would live or die.

He called in the prosecutors and defense attorneys from the case, questioned detectives who had interrogated Kokoraleis in the slaying of 21-year-old secretary Lorraine Borowski. He spent nights poring over stacks of legal documents.

On March 16, hours before Kokoraleis (pronounced Koka-RAL-us) was scheduled to die, Ryan still hadn’t made up his mind, and directed an aide to prepare the documents for a 90-day stay of execution. There was a phone on his desk with a direct link to the execution chamber 361 miles south near the town of Tamms.

A Methodist, he prayed. He asked others to pray. But he didn’t file the stay and he didn’t lift the receiver.

“I finally decided he was guilty, and needed to be executed,” Ryan recalls.

At 12:33 a.m. on March 17, prison officials sent a chemical solution flowing into Kokoraleis’ arm. Four minutes later, he licked his lips, breathed heavily three times, and died.

It was the only execution Ryan would oversee. The 68-year-old Midwestern conservative was on his reluctant way to becoming the unlikeliest of heroes to death penalty opponents around the world, and at the same time a pariah in his own state party.

Over the next 10 months, fissures in the system would turn to cracks, which would turn to crevasses.

Prosecutors who “knew or should have known” they were trying the wrong men were sending them to death row anyway; the accused were being defended by disbarred lawyers; death sentences were being issued solely on the testimony of jailhouse informants -- prisoners with nothing to lose and freedom to gain in exchange for damning testimony.

On Monday, Jan. 31, 2000, Ryan was again sitting in his office here, 16 floors above a melancholy wash of old gray snow, when the state attorney general called. Several death row inmates had lost their final appeals, he said, and it was time to schedule them for the death chamber.

“Well,” Ryan grumbled, “you might want to hold off on that. I might have something to say.”

Media Summoned

He hung up and instructed his staff to call a news conference immediately. He did have something to say.

“Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty,” Ryan announced, “until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate.”

Ryan is now considering clemency requests by 142 of the state’s 160 death row inmates and is likely to commute some of their sentences to life terms, aides say.

Nearly three years after he called the moratorium, two months before he leaves politics, probably for good, it is not clear even to Ryan how much his fundamental philosophy has changed when it comes to the death penalty.

He still believes that some crimes deserve the final punishment, believes he made the right decision with Kokoraleis. But when asked recently if a flawless system were built, one that could never execute an innocent person, would he then oppose executions on philosophical or moral grounds, Ryan pauses at length.

“That’s one of the things I’m still wrestling with,” he says in an uncharacteristically hushed voice. “I don’t know how you ever make it perfect.”

When Ryan returns home to Kankakee in January after 30 years in politics, he will leave behind a legacy he neither dreamed nor wanted, one that reportedly had him being considered for a Nobel Peace prize at the same time fellow Republicans were rushing him into retirement.

“The debate has shifted dramatically,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center. Just a few years ago, politicians “didn’t want to question the death penalty, let alone oppose it. I think Gov. Ryan has been uniquely important in that he is a Republican and a supporter of the death penalty ... and yet was somebody who was visibly and dramatically changed by being responsible for the death penalty in his state.”

George H. Ryan was born in Louisiana in 1934, and as a young boy moved with his parents to Kankakee, a farm town 60 miles south of Chicago. He grew up the conservative son of a conservative pharmacist, served two years in the Army in Korea and, when he got out, married his high school sweetheart, Lura Lynn, with whom he now has six children and 14 grandchildren. He studied pharmacology and joined the family business.

Politics, though, soon pulled at him. And in 1972, with the family increasingly comfortable in its ownership of several drugstores, Ryan ran successfully for the state Legislature. Five years later, Illinois, like much of the nation, was in the midst of a debate over reinstating the death penalty.

As the Legislature prepared to vote on the issue, a colleague asked who among them would be willing to throw the switch. Ryan had no gruesome longing to be an executioner, but he firmly believed that certain criminals deserved to die. He stood and voted to reinstate -- and then forgot about the death penalty, he says, except in the most abstract way.

Law-and-Order Man

Ryan became speaker of the House, then lieutenant governor, then secretary of state in 1991. During his eight years as secretary, he lowered the legal limit for drunk driving, required that school bus drivers undergo criminal background checks and otherwise solidified his credentials as a law-and-order man.

It’s not that his beliefs and politics were uncomplicated; Ryan irked many in his party with his support of gun control and some types of affirmative action. But over the years his opinions had solidified: the war on drugs was worthy; tollways had become outdated; the death penalty was what it was.

In 1998, he was elected governor, and took office under a weighty mantle of campaign promises, from rebuilding highways to raising sentences for gun crimes to doubling the number of parole officers.

A month after Ryan was sworn in, though, Anthony Porter, who had been convicted of murder, was freed after 16 years on death row because of the work of journalism students from Northwestern University. Porter was two days from dying when his execution was stayed.

One month later, another death row inmate, Steven Smith, was exonerated, becoming the 11th person to be freed since Illinois reinstated the death penalty.

Stunned by the revelations, Ryan began privately discussing the possibility of a moratorium.

Then the Kokoraleis case landed on his desk. The death penalty “wasn’t in the abstract anymore,” Ryan says.

Kokoraleis had been one of four members of a group who dubbed themselves “The Ripper Crew” that in the early 1980s committed as many as 18 murders, gang-raping and cutting the breasts off some of the women before killing them.

Even after Ryan decided there was no doubt as to Kokoraleis’ guilt, he struggled.

“It was absolute anguish that [Ryan] went through when it came to that first case,” said Jeremy Margolis, a Chicago attorney and unofficial advisor who was with Ryan during the execution. “He had to wrestle for the first time in his life with the human factors that come with the death penalty.... ‘How would I feel if I were the father of the victim? How would I feel if I were the father of the defendant?’ ”

Ryan doesn’t mark Kokoraleis’ death as his turning point, and those who know him say he did not dwell on the execution once it was over. But, Ryan makes clear, he never wants to do it again.

“It’s an awesome decision that I’m not sure belongs in the hands of anybody, any one person, [including] the governor,” he says, adding that a review board may be a better answer, but he’s not certain.

The same day Kokoraleis was put to death, Cook County prosecutors dropped charges against Ronald Jones after DNA tests exonerated him from a rape and murder conviction. He had spent eight years on death row.

Evidence of serious trouble in the system continued to mount.

In November 1999, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of stories detailing flaws in the process: Half of the nearly 300 capital cases had been reversed for a sentencing hearing or new trial; 33 death row inmates had been represented by attorneys who had been suspended or disbarred; prosecutors had used jailhouse informants to help prosecute 46 of the inmates.

Two months later, on Jan. 19, 2000, Steven Manning, a former Chicago police officer, was cleared in the 1990 murder of a onetime business partner and freed from death row. That brought to 13 the number of death row inmates exonerated since capital punishment was reinstated; 12 had been executed.

The 2000 presidential primaries were underway. The Republican nominee, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who authorized 152 executions, favored the death penalty. So did Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate.

It was in this environment that Ryan summoned his top advisors to a Benihana restaurant in the Loop for a late working dinner on Jan. 29. Over sushi and stir fry, the chef looking like a baton twirler with his silver knives flashing, Ryan talked about putting all executions on hold.

“He was 90% sure about the moratorium by the end of dinner, but not 100%,” said press secretary Dennis Culloton.

The following Monday, the attorney general called about scheduling the executions.

“I think that’s when he made up his mind -- on the phone with the attorney general,” Culloton said.

Ryan is a big man with thick, calloused hands. He has a gravel pit of a voice that rises considerably in volume but very little in pitch. He dresses in dark suits, white shirts, conservative ties and function-before-fashion gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

Everything about him says: You want fancy, novel solutions? Go somewhere else. You want to build some highways, a new stadium, push through some solid legislation? Come see me. We’ll have some meetings, make some deals and get it done.

His predecessor, Jim Edgar, was a moderate, a consensus builder and a teetotaler who banned alcohol at the governor’s mansion. When Ryan moved in, the drinks came back out -- his preference being the occasional bloody mary -- and the old-style Illinois deal-makers came back in.

His accomplishments, including a massive $12-billion effort to rebuild the state’s sagging infrastructure and markedly increasing education funding, however, have been largely overshadowed by controversies -- first a scandal that followed Ryan from his days as secretary of state, and then the moratorium.

Staff Troubles

Underlings in his Motor Vehicles Division, it turned out, had been handing out commercial driver’s licenses in exchange for bribes. Operation Safe Road, an ongoing federal probe into the bribes, has resulted in 50 convictions thus far, and revealed that about $170,000 in bribe money wound up in Ryan’s gubernatorial campaign coffers. Ryan has not been accused of wrongdoing and has denied any knowledge of the kickbacks.

The probe, however, has colored his governorship from the first day. And as the parties began planning their 2002 campaigns, the pressure for Ryan to bow out became tremendous.

In an interview in August 2001, state Republican Party executive director Brad Goodrich put it as delicately as he could: “Because of the affection so many of us hold for the governor and his family, many hope he chooses not to put himself and his family through a difficult campaign.”

The next day, Ryan announced he would not seek a second term.

Throughout the tumult, though, the thing that has haunted him most, friends and aides say, has been the specter of executing an innocent person.

Lined up on the floor of his Chicago office are 11 4-inch-thick binders containing the guts of every capital case in the state. Ryan and his advisors study them on planes, in cars, reference them for journalists from as far away as Britain, Italy, Japan.

For Ryan, increasingly conflicted about the death penalty, the moratorium was but a first step. Less than two months later, in March 2000, he appointed a Commission on Capital Punishment to study Illinois’ system, stocking it with prosecutors, cops, defense attorneys and judges. As the commission worked, he vetoed two bills that would have expanded the death penalty.

Then, in March of this year, Ryan and several staffers boarded a commercial flight to Eugene, Ore., where he was to deliver a speech on the death penalty at the University of Oregon.

On the Southwest Airlines 737, they discussed his latest pondering: issuing a blanket clemency for all condemned prisoners in Illinois, commuting their death sentences to terms of life in prison. It was just an idea.

“The speech was over when some young [prosecutor] said, ‘You know, if you feel this strongly about it, why don’t you commute all the sentences?’ ” Ryan recalls. It was a challenge. “I said, ‘I may well do that.’”

His chief aide for the death penalty, former federal prosecutor Matt Bettenhausen, winced. Here we go again, Bettenhausen thought. Indeed, within minutes, the staffers’ cell phones and pagers were ringing and buzzing. “It was a question and I answered it -- without a lot of thought,” Ryan says matter-of-factly.

By the time the group returned to Illinois, Ryan’s statement in Oregon had sunk in. The governor was now considering changing the sentence of every death row inmate by executive fiat.

The outcry from victims’ families, prosecutors, police and others rose immediately but was swiftly drowned out -- for a time -- by the release of the capital punishment commission’s report. The death penalty system in Illinois, the report said, was junk, a potentially disastrous heap of laws tossed one on top of another.

“Our study revealed a system that is desperately in need of repair,” said Thomas Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor and co-chair of the commission.

An hour before the commission released its report publicly, members of the panel gathered to discuss their findings with Ryan.

Scott Turow, a Chicago lawyer who is the author of such legal thrillers as “Presumed Innocent” and one of the commissioners, remembers Ryan’s reaction when the panel saluted him for his courage.

“Ryan looked honestly startled,” Turow recalled. “He said, ‘What else was I going to do?’ ”

Ryan’s controversial decision to impose the moratorium was vindicated, and more. The commission -- which Ryan was first accused of stacking with death penalty proponents, and later opponents -- did not recommend scrapping the death penalty, but said the machine should not be restarted unless and until it was stripped down and rebuilt.

Among the commission’s recommendations: create a panel to review prosecutors’ decisions to seek the death penalty before the case goes to trial; do away with 15 of the 20 aggravating factors that can lead to a death sentence; ban execution of the mentally retarded; and prohibit death sentences based solely on the testimony of an eyewitness or jailhouse informant.

Ryan was emboldened by the report, friends say. He began to speak openly and frequently about the possibility of commuting all death sentences. And he pushed ahead with plans to hold a hearing on the case of every death row inmate who wanted to seek clemency.

The families of victims, prosecutors, police and politicians began again to decry what they called Ryan’s insensitivity and temerity; how dare he, with a signature, undercut the judicial process for thousands of people who suffered a loved one murdered?

The two weeks of hearings, which ended Oct. 25, became the most serious challenge yet to Ryan’s reform efforts. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there was little doubt about the guilt of the condemned. They did it. One murdered children and sodomized their corpses, one smashed an 86-year-old woman’s skull with her cane, another killed a pregnant woman and sliced her fetus from her womb.

“Shame on you, Gov. Ryan,” said Marie Kalbert, whose sister was beaten to death with a hammer.

After a week of being excoriated at the hearings, Ryan said he would likely not grant a blanket clemency, but rather handle each case individually. Aides say one or two inmates may indeed be innocent, and that Ryan may commute sentences he believes were unfairly handled even though they haven’t been overturned by a court.

Democrat Rod Blagojevich, who beat Secretary of State Jim Ryan -- no relation to George Ryan -- in Tuesday’s gubernatorial race, has said he will leave the moratorium in place, at least until the Legislature addresses problems pointed out by the death penalty commission.

On a clear, cool fall day just before the hearings began, Ryan sat down in his Chicago office to discuss state-sanctioned executions.

He looks a bit tired, but he often looks that way these days. The Chicago Sun-Times had recently run a front-page story dubbing him “Gov. Grumpy,” suggesting that the scandals and his status as a lame duck have left him “mean-spirited” and uncaring about the will of the voters.

He sits on a long sofa and talks about how maybe an attorney would be more qualified than a pharmacist to carry out an execution or oversee a death penalty system, but probably not. He talks about the pressure from his party.

“I’ve had some people say, ‘Don’t do anything crazy with the death penalty. We don’t want to lose our base,’ ” he says.

He talks about a close neighbor in Kankakee who was murdered, and about how his views on capital punishment began to shift, decades after he thought they had set permanently.

“I always thought that the death penalty was maybe a deterrent. But I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t know what it deters.”

He talks about Andrew Kokoraleis, how he knew the man had committed that murder, and how he could have picked up the phone and stopped the execution anyway, but didn’t.

“It’s bad enough,” he says, “if the guy’s guilty.”