Working under a Monday deadline, lawyers have been finishing clemency petitions for 160 inmates on Illinois’ Death Row as part of a broad effort to persuade Gov. George Ryan to commute their death sentences to life in prison before he leaves office.
Already, more than 60 clemency petitions have been filed with the state’s Prisoner Review Board, which conducts hearings on the requests and then makes confidential, non-binding recommendations to the governor.
On Friday, attorneys and investigators were at the state’s Death Rows hoping to get inmate signatures to complete other petitions. They planned to continue working through 5 p.m. Monday, when petitions are due in Springfield.
Ryan, who is not running for re-election and will leave office in January, said earlier this year that he would consider sweeping commutations out of concern that most inmates on Death Row were tried and sentenced before any of the state’s death penalty reforms.
The governor’s comments prompted death penalty attorneys to organize the clemency effort and, more recently, spurred prosecutors who oppose blanket commutations to begin contacting the families of Death Row inmates’ murder victims.
“What’s developing here is a historic opportunity for Gov. Ryan to decide whether the system can tolerate continuing with these as death penalty cases in light of all we’ve learned the last couple years,” Locke Bowman, an attorney at the University of Chicago’s MacArthur Justice Center and a coordinator of the clemency effort, said Friday.
In spite of the effort, some two dozen inmates on Death Row had refused to sign petitions, although attorneys and others were still trying to persuade them to sign.
Some of the inmates said they fear that if they leave Death Row their cases will not get the scrutiny capital cases receive. Others said they would rather die than spend the rest of their life in prison, according to lawyers.
Still others insist they are innocent and refuse to settle for a life sentence when they believe they should be freed. Edward Moore, convicted of the murder of a woman in Grundy County, is one of them.
“Ed’s position is that he believes in the judicial system and that with life without parole no one will take seriously his claim of innocence,” said his attorney, Jed Stone.
Attorneys working on the clemency petitions said they plan to file on behalf of Moore and other “uncooperative” inmates anyway.
“It’s appropriate for an outsider to come and make an argument for clemency,” Bowman said. “There are larger questions about the integrity of our criminal justice system. The governor should grant them a commutation even if they don’t want it.”
In one case that poses tough questions for the attorneys involved, lawyers are weighing whether to file a petition for Ernest Jamison because he also faces the possibility of a death sentence in Missouri, which does not have a moratorium and which executes far more inmates than Illinois.
Jamison pleaded guilty to a 1995 murder and robbery in McLean County that, according to police, he committed after a murder in Missouri. Prosecutors in Missouri have said that they would allow Jamison’s Illinois case to play out before returning him to Missouri.
“This is a thorny moral issue,” said Rob Warden of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, who is familiar with the case. “Say you get his death sentence [commuted], how would you feel when they take him to Missouri?”
In roughly a dozen cases, attorneys are filing clemency petitions for Death Row inmates who they believe are not competent to make such a decision, either because they are mentally ill or mentally retarded.
These clemency filings are the first stage of what would be the largest commutation ever of death sentences by a governor. In January 2000, Ryan declared the nation’s first moratorium on executions.
Dennis Culloton, a spokesman for the governor, said Friday that Ryan would closely follow the Prisoner Review Board hearings, which are scheduled for October. Ryan also has been reviewing some inmates’ files.
But Ryan has strongly suggested that a sweeping commutation is possible. Speaking at a death penalty conference in Oregon in March, Ryan said he would rather face criticism for granting commutations than have “an innocent person killed,” which he fears.
Moreover, blanket commutations would cement Ryan’s legacy on an issue that over the past 2 1/2 years has brought him worldwide attention, even as his administration was mired in another scandal.
It is unlikely Ryan will make a decision on the commutations until the end of the year. The Prisoner Review Board must first hold hearings and consider the cases.
Countering the efforts of those lawyers filing the clemency petitions, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office has begun to notify the families of victims in the local cases–about half the 160 cases in the state come from Cook County–about the clemency applications and the upcoming hearings.
John Gorman, a spokesman for the office, said victims’ families are being offered help with the paperwork necessary to speak at the hearings and other matters that may come up as Prisoner Review Board hearings approach.
“We have been reaching out to a couple hundred Cook County families … about their right to step up and speak,” Gorman said. “We’re telling them that if they need help, we’d be happy to help them.”
He said prosecutors also are reviewing some of the oldest cases. “We’re opposed to a blanket clemency,” Gorman said, “but as each of the cases is called, we’ll step up and address them one at a time.”
In a handful of cases, inmates have filed their own petitions or had filed earlier. Aaron Patterson, convicted of a double murder in South Chicago, already has a petition on file, as does Ronald Kliner, convicted of a murder-for-hire. Both claim they are innocent.
Attorneys have been working hard to persuade the inmates who are refusing to file to change their minds, and they plan to continue through Monday, the deadline to get on the Prisoner Review Board’s October docket. In some cases, attorneys and their clients have disagreed over what they should request–a commutation to imprisonment for life or freedom.
Ronald Barrow, convicted of the 1984 murder of an elderly man in La Salle County, initially refused to seek clemency, said his attorney, Leonard Cavise.
“His basic thinking was, `I’m an innocent man and this is no way to live,'” said Cavise, also a professor at DePaul University’s law school.
Cavise convinced Barrow that Ryan might also cut his sentence, although Ryan has never mentioned that possibility in public comments.
So Barrow, who has written some of his own legal briefs and does legal work for other condemned inmates, penned his own petition from Death Row. But Barrow said in the petition that he would not accept a life sentence.
“The time has come,” Barrow wrote in his petition, “for either the State of Illinois to release Mr. Barrow on his actual innocence by granting this request for a pardon or to silence Mr. Barrow’s proclamations of innocence by unconstitutionally executing him.”
But Lawrence Marshall of Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, said the debate is more complex and that the issue is not setting inmates free but preventing the execution of innocent inmates.
“If we make a mistake with the death penalty, it’s the ultimate error versus life without parole, where we haven’t committed an awful, grievous error,” he said. “We’re not talking about freeing people.”
