Gov. George Ryan was thundering to the close of a speech that shook the nation Friday afternoon when he made a curious reference to the “four Death Row inmates and four other men” whom he had just helped “find justice where the courts would not grant relief.”
It was curious because he’d just finished granting pardons to four Death Row inmates and only two other men.
The governor did not misspeak. The words “four other men” also appeared in the advance copies of the speech distributed in the DePaul University College of Law auditorium where he spoke.
Ryan seemed puzzled when I asked him about the discrepancy as he made his way out of the hall later. “There were four,” he said. “Weren’t there four?”
One of his aides leaned in and assured me with what I took to be a bit of a wink that “four” was a typo.
I don’t believe it. I don’t believe the speechwriter miscounted convicts or got his fingers tangled at the keys. I believe, rather, that when that part of the address was written, there were four men on Ryan’s pardon list along with the four new Death Row exonerees. And that for some reason, he decided at the last minute to withhold two of the pardons.
So who were the Typo Two?
Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock, co-defendants convicted on extraordinarily shabby evidence for a 1986 murder in Downstate Paris and are now serving life terms?
Graybeard cellmates William Heirens, 74, and Ronald Kubat, 67, whose convictions in separate murders remain very controversial?
Did the two include lifer Eric Caine, the co-defendant of Aaron Patterson, one of the Death Row inmates to whom Ryan granted a full pardon Friday? Mario Flores, a condemned prisoner whose case has reportedly received very careful attention from Ryan’s staff? Juan Rivera Jr., convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to life even though DNA evidence points to others?
There are numerous candidates. And ordinarily I wouldn’t make so much of a little glitch. But here it seems to underscore the closeness of the calls Ryan is making in his final days in office, the microscopic and shifting quality of the margin between doubt and certainty in these complex criminal cases.
Here, the Typo Two evidently fell one rough draft short of freedom. The two former non-death sentence inmates who did receive pardons Friday, Gary Dotson and Miguel Castillo, have long been out of prison.
Ryan appeared to want to keep Friday’s focus on police-torture cases out of Chicago, cases that have vexed his most petulant critic, Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine. Over and over, Devine’s refusal to give an inch even on the most dubious cases reinforced Ryan’s belief that the system is ill-equipped to correct its own errors.
Maybe the Typo Two will make the cut Saturday, when Ryan’s scope promises to be larger. He will appear at the Northwestern University School of Law to deliver his rulings on petitions from most of Illinois’ Death Row inmates to have their sentences reduced to life without parole.
Are more pardons or commutations to time already served also in the offing? Ryan answered elliptically: “Tomorrow is another day.”
His remarks Friday seemed aimed at laying the groundwork for a blanket commutation.
He charged that capital justice in Illinois is “wildly inaccurate, unjust, unable to separate the innocent from the guilty and, at times, very racist,” and that the state legislature had repeatedly exhibited its indifference to significant reform.
He underscored the arbitrary quality of the death penalty–how whether a convict lives or dies can depend not on the crime he’s committed, but where he committed it, how good his lawyer was and the sensitivities of state’s attorneys. In particular he noted how DuPage County officials, once so eager to execute Rolando Cruz and Alex Hernandez in the politically charged Jeanine Nicarico case, have failed “to this day, to this minute” to indict the man whom DNA evidence now links conclusively to the crime.
Ryan also reminded his audience that life in prison is “stark.”
For him now to leave inmates behind on Death Row as he leaves office would amount to a moral non sequitur. A blanket commutation is logically inevitable, and his speech will shake the world, not just the nation.
But at a time so fraught and fluid that four can suddenly equal two, nothing is certain.
