In a private, emotional meeting in a Near South Side Chicago church, family members of 45 Death Row inmates one by one asked Gov. George Ryan to commute the sentences of their children, siblings and parents.
“How do you look a mother in the eye, especially when the system is broken?” the governor said Friday outside Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church. “I have to wonder if he’s really guilty.”
He was there “strictly to listen,” the governor said, before deciding whether to commute any of the 142 death sentences to life in prison without parole.
“Every option that’s available is what I’m going to look at,” he said.
Relatives said they detailed individual cases and spoke about the death penalty in general in the three-hour session.
“This meeting is about clemency for everyone on Death Row and to stop the death penalty,” said Robin Hobley, sister of Death Row inmate Madison Hobley. “We’re not trying to let out people who are killers, but there are people who are on Death Row who are innocent. Madison is one of those. It’s time for Madison to come home.”
Geraldine Fuller said she hopes her son won’t be put to death.
“I’m not condoning what my son has done,” said the mother of Tyrone Fuller. “But I don’t want him to die. He has four daughters and a son, and I don’t know what to tell them.”
Ryan, who leaves office Jan. 13, is expected to reveal his decision on commutation Friday.
In 2000, he imposed a moratorium on executions in Illinois after the release of the 13th Death Row inmate because of a wrongful conviction.
On Friday, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa joined those who have urged Ryan to issue a blanket commutation. In a letter, Tutu wrote that “justice allows for mercy, for clemency, for compassion” and that those “virtues are not weaknesses.”
Ryan previously has met with relatives of murder victims.
“The governor had a hard time looking the victims’ families in the eyes too,” said John Gorman, a spokesman for Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine.
Gorman criticized Ryan for “buying into the mantra of defense attorneys” who say the judicial system is broken.
“The system is broken because it has kept inmates like Kenneth Allen alive for 23 years,” he said of the man convicted of the 1979 murders of two Chicago police officers.
