Ryan betrayed us, families of victims say

Using words like "liar" and "criminal" and "dictator," family members of murder victims and prosecutors across the suburbs were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of Gov. George Ryan for his commutation of death sentences.

Complaints ranged from the venue in which Ryan chose to make his announcement to accusations that he had promised families not to grant blanket commutations.

"This should be a criminal act," said Dawn Pueschel, sister of murder victim Dean Pueschel. "This is a crime to do what the governor has done."

claims; because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious -- and therefore immoral -- ‘I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,'æ" Ryan proclaimed, quoting Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's dissent to the constitutionality of executions.

Ryan's remarks roused a packed lecture hall at the law school of Northwestern University, whose professors and students have helped free numerous innocent men from death row. The audience included international media, parents, spouses and children of the once-condemned, and numerous men freed from death row.

Ryan, who voted to reinstate Illinois' death penalty in 1977, had done a nearly full reversal by 2000, when he halted all executions after it became clear the state's capital punishment system was troubled.

Thirteen men had been exonerated from death row at that point, one more than the number of those executed, whom Ryan said Friday he "hoped" were guilty. Only one man was executed under Ryan's tenure.

Ryan on Saturday also pointed to figures that nearly half of the 300 death sentences handed down in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or resentencing.

"Nearly half," Ryan said Saturday. "How in God's name does that happen? In America, how does it happen? I've been asking this question for three years, and nobody's given me an answer. As I stand here today, no one's given me an answer."

After announcing he would consider blanket commutation last year, a marathon series of more than 140 clemency hearings was held before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board. In the end, the board recommended clemency for 10 cases, but state laws don't require Ryan to follow that.

They featured tearful testimony from relatives of victims, many of whom accused Ryan of forcing them to relive the crimes. They urged Ryan to let the state kill those convicted of killing their loved ones. They also brought the message to Ryan in news conferences and meetings with Ryan.

"I was struck by the anger of the families of murder victims," he said. "To a family, they talked about closure. They pleaded with me to allow the state to kill an inmate in its name to provide the families with closure. But is that the purpose of capital punishment? Is it to soothe the families? And is that truly what the families experience?"

After declaring a moratorium, Ryan appointed a commission to study the problem. Its more than 80 recommendations included videotaping police interrogations and creating a statewide panel to determine which crimes are death penalty-eligible, as opposed to the discretion of each county prosecutor, as it is now.

None of the recommendations has been adopted, and Ryan said that played a part in his decision, which went into effect early Saturday for most inmates.

His speech, which included references to Abraham Lincoln and South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, drew several standing ovations and praise from supporters.

Ryan commuted 164 death sentences to life without parole and reduced three others to 40 years in prison. Ryan said he took the action to make those three prisoners' sentences match their codefendants'.

"George Ryan could have passed the buck," said Professor Lawrence Marshall, legal director for Northwestern's Center on Wrongful Convictions. "Instead, he realized that the constitution vested in him this solemn duty. Gov. Ryan, you have taught the world so much."

"I think a blanket clemency is a mistake," he said. "It is wrong. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this."

Blagojevich said his administration, which takes power Monday, will conduct a review of the governor's clemency powers, although no legal experts believe Ryan's commutations can be undone.

Ryan's move Saturday signifies the most significant attack on capital punishment since 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

Other governors have issued commutations, but nothing on the scale of what Ryan has done. The most recent precedent for blanket clemency came in 1986 when the governor of New Mexico commuted the death sentences of the state's five death row inmates.

"We've been saying forever that the death penalty is fatally flawed," said Jed Stone, lawyer for several men sentenced to death, including Ronald Kliner, formerly of Palatine. "And now we have the highest elected official in the state standing firmly with us."

Kliner has maintained his innocence, but many on death row have appealed for mercy on other grounds.

Citing the fact that many convicts did not claim innocence, victims' relatives blasted Ryan Saturday.

"All he talked about is the death penalty issue, which, for this governor, is to be expected, said Sam Evans of Bridgeport, whose daughter Debra Evans was killed in her Addison apartment in 1995, along with two of her children. A fetus also was cut from Evans' womb, and that child is now 7 years old.

Jacqueline Williams and Fedell Caffey were convicted of the crime and sentenced to die.

He said even his own wife, Lura Lynn, was angry at him for one case in particular. He choked up when he spoke of Steve Small, a Kankakee businessman and friend of the Ryans who was buried alive and suffocated to death. Daniel Edwards was convicted and sentenced to die for that crime.

"My wife even was angry and disappointed at my decision like many of the families of other victims will be," he said.

You were, you recall, not quoting the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" of the Decalogue. You were quoting the provisions that were made for the administration of civil law of the Hebrew people.

We use the 10 commandments as a foundation for our civil law and the constitution in this country, yes? Most of the founding fathers were devout CHRISTIANS that understood the scripture...and knew the importance of acknowledging God Almighty in the affairs of men. If they didn't study the Word to see how to punish infractions in society.....do you think they just had a seance and divined it all?

Does your understanding of an "unchanging God" translate into unchanging prescriptions for civil law punishments for all offenses in all societies?

Well...God has now been taken out of the courts, schools, etc.....what do YOU think? Look around and see what a MESS it is. Look at other countries....and tell me why our judicial system is the best and our country so much greater?

If it does, it cannot account for the fact that the Noahide gentile societies were not commanded with the Mosaic law.

The Noahide Gentiles???? What in the WORLD does that have to do with this discussion? Did they take part in setting up the political and judicial system in this nation?

We cannot wave this or that verse of the bible around as if it were some wild card rather than specific information in a specific context. This practice gives human whim a pseudo divine endorsement.

I don't "wave" anything. I try to follow the Word as best I can, trusting God to reveal His plan in my life. Human "whim" with a pseudo divine endorsement is what we've achieved in this country thru secular humanism/socialism; deciding we have no need for God or any of His laws/statutes.

Denying the importance of deterrence has been a gross and costly error in the propaganda war waged against us by those opposed to any capital punishment.

The More Unobstructed the Death Penalty the More It Deters Murder

Based upon an extreme assertion, "the death penalty never deters murder," too many opponents to Capital Punishment have been misled to believe they can claim the moral high-ground. At best they, and those who leave that statement unchallenged, are deluded.

If moral spokesmen use the above chart, they will show up this assertion for the lie it is. That lie was, with little doubt, adopted by the criminal coddlers mixed in with the obstructers. The coddlers have very bloody hands and a good deal of the rest are useful idiots to those bloody hands. When you help relieve the world of this delusion, those coddlers of murderers will be stripped naked. Those coddlers of murderers will be left only with their very bloody hands. Those coddlers of murderers are accomplices before the fact of up to nearly half a million EXTRA murders in the last 37 years in the USA alone.

Those who flatly assert "the death penalty never deters murder" are extremists who peddle a lie. With their typically liberal bias, our lamestream media have made that lie a staple of lamestream discussions of the death penalty: a frequently parroted canard.

Both the evil and the mindless repeat that lie endlessly. And too many so-called pro-death-penalty spokesman never slam them for repeating this lie.

End the silence.
Strip death penalty obstructers of their deluded self-congratulation.
Use this chart.

Carrington said in his book that the felons would take their Virginia victims they wanted to eliminate over into DC so as to avoid Virginia's Death Penalty law. All VA could get them on was the robbery and kidnapping.

Frank G. Carrington, "Neither Cruel Nor Unusual Punishment":

Year ----Executions -----Number of homicides
1955----76----7,000+
1960----56----8,000+
1966----1----10,000+
1972----0----18,000+
1975----0----20,000+
1993----38----24,562 BJS
1994----31----23,305 BJS
1995----56----20,347 BJS
1996----45----19,645 BJS
1997----74----18,209 BJS
1998----68----16,914 BJS

Does Capital Punishment Deter Crime?

http://www.infinet.com/~jayj/capdeter.htm Capital punishment saves lives

Boston Globe | June 6, 2002 | Jeff Jacoby

Second of two parts DEATH PENALTY abolitionists don't usually mention it, but in promoting a moratorium on executions, they are urging us down a road we have taken before.

In the mid-1960s, as a number of legal challenges to capital punishment began working their way through the courts, executions in the United States came to a halt. From 56 in 1960, the number of killers put to death dropped to seven in 1965, to one in 1966, and to zero in 1967. There it stayed for the next 10 years, until the State of Utah executed Gary Gilmore in 1977. That was the only execution in 1977, and there were only two more during the next three years.

In sum, between 1965 and 1980, there was practically no death penalty in the United States, and for 10 of those 16 years - 1967-76 - there was literally no death penalty: a national moratorium.

What was the effect of making capital punishment unavailable for a decade and a half? Did a moratorium on executions save innocent lives - or cost them?

The data are brutal. Between 1965 and 1980, annual murders in the United States skyrocketed, rising from 9,960 to 23,040. The murder rate - homicides per 100,000 persons - doubled from 5.1 to 10.2.

Was it just a fluke that the steepest increase in murder in US history coincided with the years when the death penalty was not available to punish it? Perhaps. Or perhaps murder becomes more attractive when potential killers know that prison is the worst outcome they can face.

By contrast, common sense suggests that there are at least some people who will not commit murder if they think it might cost them their lives. Sure enough, as executions have become more numerous, murder has declined. ''From 1995 to 2000,'' notes Dudley Sharp of the victims rights group Justice For All, ''executions averaged 71 per year, a 21,000 percent increase over the 1966-1980 period. The murder rate dropped from a high of 10.2 (per 100,000) in 1980 to 5.7 in 1999 - a 44 percent reduction. The murder rate is now at its lowest level since 1966.''

What is true nationally has been observed locally as well. There were 12,652 homicides in New York during the 25 years from 1940 to 1965, when New York regularly executed murderers. By contrast, during the 25 years from 1966 to 1991 there were no executions at all - and murders quadrupled to 51,638.

To be sure, murder rates fell in almost every state in the 1990s. But they fell the most in states that use capital punishment. The most striking protection of innocent life has been in Texas, which executes more murderers than any other state. In 1991, the Texas murder rate was 15.3 per 100,000. By 1999, it had fallen to 6.1 - a drop of 60 percent. Within Texas, the most aggressive death penalty prosecutions are in Harris County (the Houston area). Since the resumption of executions in 1982, the annual number of Harris County murders has plummeted from 701 to 241 - a 72 percent decrease.

Obviously, murder and the rate at which it occurs are affected by more than just the presence or absence of the death penalty. But even after taking that caveat into account, it seems irrefutably clear that when murderers are executed, innocent lives are saved. And when executions are stopped, innocent lives are lost.

Death penalty abolitionists (and a few death penalty supporters) claim that a moratorium on executions is warranted because the criminal justice system is ''broken'' and the death penalty is unfairly applied. But if that's true when the punishment is death, how much more so is it true when the punishment isn't death! Death penalty prosecutions typically undergo years of appeals, often attracting intense scrutiny and media attention. So painstaking is the super-due process of capital murder cases that for all the recent hype about innocent prisoners on death row, there is not a single proven case in modern times of an innocent person being executed in the United States.

But the due process in non-death penalty cases is not nearly as scrupulous. Everyone knows that there are innocent people behind bars today. If the legal system's flaws justify a moratorium on capital punishment, a fortiori they justify a moratorium on imprisonment. Those who call for a moratorium on executions should be calling just as vehemently for a moratorium on prison terms. Why don't they?

Because they know how ridiculous it would sound. If there are problems with the system, the system should be fixed, but refusing to punish criminals would succeed only in making society far less safe than it is today.

The same would be true of a moratorium on executions. If due process in capital murder cases can be made even more watertight, by all means let us do so. But not by keeping the worst of our murderers alive until perfection is achieved. We've been down the moratorium road before. We know how that experiment turns out. The results are written in wrenching detail on gravestones across the land.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 6/6/2002.

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