CHICAGO — The state of Illinois must repeal the death penalty because the system is faulty, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan said Friday to about 90 people at Northwestern’s Chicago Campus.
“If you’re going to take someone’s life under a system that’s not perfect, then you shouldn’t have that system,” Ryan said.
Ryan spoke to Chicago-area residents, as well as NU students and faculty, in the Law School’s Lincoln Hall.
His speech was part of a free, day-long symposium on the death penalty, sponsored by the law school’s student-run Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.
Other aspects of the symposium included the presentation of research papers on the death penalty by professors and scholars from throughout the United States.
Before he left office in January 2003, Ryan commuted the sentences of all 167 of the state’s death row inmates to life in prison without parole.
Ryan reflected on his choices Friday, in the same room where he made that announcement nearly two years ago.
Students from the Medill School of Journalism worked in 1999 to exonerate death row inmate Anthony Porter, who served almost 17 years on death row for a double homicide. Two days before Porter’s scheduled execution, he was granted a reprieve. Students proved Porter’s innocence in a later hearing.
Ryan said he watched on television as Porter was released from prison and asked his wife how innocent people could be jailed in America. At that point, Ryan said on Friday, the governor did what he thought was right. He called a moratorium, pending a thorough review of the state’s capital punishment process.
The 2002 the release of a report on Illinois’ death penalty illuminated a flawed system.
“There was no doubt in my mind — the system I supported and believed in throughout my life was a bad system,” he said.
Ryan added that the death penalty is not the answer to getting justice for victims.
“We can extract justice for crimes by locking up the perpetrators for crimes,” Ryan said. “That’s a fate worse than death.”
The symposium marked a personal milestone for Sue Gauger, whose husband, Gary, is an exonerated death row inmate.
Gary Gauger was charged in 1993 with the murder of his parents and spent 3.5 years in prison. Wrongfully convicted, he was released in 1996 and pardoned in December 2002, Sue Gauger said.
Sue Gauger said she attended Ryan’s commutation speech almost two years ago and came back Friday to hear his reflections.
“He has still kept this very strong conviction that there’s a better way to do it than executing people,” she said.
For Gauger, the death penalty topic affects her family on both sides — as the family of murder victims and as the family of an innocent man who served on death row. But Gauger said the death penalty gives little comfort to a family.
“It’s not going to bring (Gary’s) parents back,” she said.
Third-year law student George Luce said Ryan’s speech indicated the former governor believed strongly in what he did.
But Ryan’s argument against the death penalty on the basis of a high error rate is flawed because there are errors inherent in other areas of the justice system, Luce said.
“I thought he was a little bit disingenuous on that matter,” Luce said.
“It was more of a question of emotional distaste rather than executing innocent people,” he continued.
