http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/11/illinois.death.row/index.html It's rare that I'm actually proud of the actions of an Illinois governor. This is a big freakin' exception.
Will you be proud when one of the three who didn't even get life without the possiblity of parole gets out and commits murder again? How about when one of the others escapes (like the "Texas Seven")and goes on a spree like a couple of years back? What will the ultimate human cost be in Illinois and surrounding state be from this? I suppose it will be quite a while before we find out and once it happens, the mainstream media will try to surpress it.
Yeah, those three guys who got the slap on the wrist that is a 40 year sentence. I'm terrified of them. 17 innocent people have been released from Illinois' Death Row. If ordinary people with no connection to their cases hadn't gone to extraordinary lengths to investigate the facts at hand, those 17 innocent people would have been killed in my name, at the hands of my state. There will always be murderers among us. I'm just happy that they no longer wear judicial robes, at least in Illinois.
I actually agree with the incomming Democratic governor on this one. They should have been looked at on a case by case basis rather than a blanket commutation. An interesting note, the article on yahoo I just read on this didn't mention that the governor was a Republican. I wonder why?
Good for Ryan. It's rare to find a politican who can be for the death penalty in theory but still recognizes that the system is fatally flawed when it comes to actually deciding who is and is not worthy to live. It's very easy for everyone to agree that John Wayne Gacy and Tim McVeigh deserved to die, but how many of those clear-cut cases are there? For every death row inmate, there's somebody else who is serving life in jail for virtually the same crime because either they pled guilty or could afford a lawyer skilled enough to keep them off death row. And yes, Ludahai, it should have been noted in the news reports that he's a Republican. Let's see what sort of coverage he gets in the next week from the GOP and Democrat bloggers.
It's rare that I'm embarrassed by the actions of an Illinois gov., mainly because I don't live there. Illinois definitely had problems enacting the death penalty statute but it seems like he's throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Because of the severity of the death sentence, capital cases undergo the most scrutiny. I'll bet the good majority of the people in Illinois still support the death penalty, just not as it was being carried out. This gov. seems to pushing his own anti-death penalty agenda and he won't be around to see the consequences. In that respect he's dropping a bomb & running. He'll be able to "sleep at night" as he said, but the victims' families won't sleep easy. A cowardly act during his last days in office.
There were problems with the prosecuters cases.Unfortunatley with some of the ones freed there has been evidence proving them guilty that was tainted becuase it was connected to previous mishaps.Not all of those seventeen were innocent.One case which everyone loves to drag out is Rolondo Cruz... who was SEEN at the crime scene and there is evidence him being part of the it.But becuase of fishy evidence collecting and an over zealous DA he is walking free.Yes and becuase of DNA evidence.. I didnt say he was part of the rape.But there was evidence pointing to him participating in at least the kidnapping. To go back to the Attorney general election.. Instead of going after birkett on putting a man on death row with coersion.. Lil Lisa should have gone after him for letting a possibly guilty man walk free for screwing up the case. The real problem isnt innocent men on death row.Its the lawyers and cops who screwed up case after case with being overzealous.
Sounds like a lot of Illinois defendants with incompetent OJ Simpson-like prosecutors will be back to a streetcorner near you. Make sure you're strapped! (uh-oh! this will drive the gun control people nuts now!)
Re: Re: Illinois Governor Commutes 157 Death Sentences Cowardly? That's insane. The cowardly thing would be to do nothing, to not address a system which is fundamentally flawed. If commuting the sentences of guilty people from death to life without parole is such a horrible miscarriage of justice, then the responsibility for the miscarriage lies with the people who broke the system. That's not the governor, that's the policemen and prosecutors who systematically abused their power for twenty years. As for the victims' families, the criminal justice system does not exist to give them solace or revenge, it exists to protect society. The all-out desire to provide "closure" to survivors and families has put undue pressure on the system to produce convictions at the expense of fairness and justice.
Governor Ryan is a moron. To issue a blanket commutation of 160 convicted murderers is insane. They could've easily reviewed each case individually, instead we get one man re-opening the wounds of all the victims' families. Pinhead.
Re: Re: Re: Illinois Governor Commutes 157 Death Sentences Too bad so many people, like McCracken can't comprehend this. It has made a mockery of our justice system. Relatives of victims present at executions, victims and/or their families having an impact on parole hearings, people trying to keep men who have served their sentences in jail because 'they couldn't live knowing that awful man is walking free'? Where the fvck do all these people get off doing this sh!t? And this isn't even the worst stuff. A few days ago, I think it was the sentencing in that annoying Van Damm case and the mother of the victim had this hysterical, haphazard rant right before the sentencing, insulting the murderer. Now, what the hell was that all about. Are you the judge? Are you the DA? A part of the defense team? Were you called to the stand as a witness? No? Then shut the fvck up and let people who went to law school talk. And then, supposedly, the juries are going to be impartial. Riiiight.
Re: Re: Re: Illinois Governor Commutes 157 Death Sentences I Agree. It's either the state handles it, or we go back to blood feuds...you can't have both. The state isn't your strong arm man. Also in a very basic way this whole system of ours is set up to protect the accused, not the accuser. There are reasons for that.
Re: Re: Re: Illinois Governor Commutes 157 Death Sentences And speaking from first-hand experience as a former state deputy attorney general who worked on capital cases, rarely does the execution of a condemned defendant give the victim's family anything remotely close to closure. The death of their loved ones is always with them. Killing the defendant doesn't take the pain away. In every single case that I worked on, I had the victims' families tell me that they thought they would feel better when the defendant was executed. After all was said and done, they realized that they in fact didn't feel any better.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Illinois Governor Commutes 157 Death Sentences that has to be the funniest thing I've ever read on here. i didn't know they had computers on death row!
Re: Re: Illinois Governor Commutes 157 Death Sentences You wanna know what's cowardly? Public opinion on this matter. The REALITY of public opinion with regard to state-sponsored killing is that the public embraces it when the country is not at war, and abhors it when it is. Conclusion: when men and women are actually experiencing death in their own communities, when death is coming home to them in the form of their own young men in uniform, enough is enough; when we havent' killed abroad in a while, we like to start killing at home. The fact that public opinion about the value of life oscillates around our own personal tragedies, that's cowardly...Ryan WILL be remembered by those generations who survive this age as a hero, and is a harbinger of things to come, things that MUST come, if the human race is to survive at all...reverence for life, period.
Mike, while the sentiment was not expressed very well, the point is that criminal justice in the US is not personal. That case wasn't Child's Family vs. Criminal. It was State vs. Criminal. I don't think the articularity of a murdered girl's parents, or their emotionality, should have an impact on the sentence of the murderer. Only the circumstances of the crime.
What a twisted scumbag Ryan was. I'm glad to be shed of him. Commutation -- as opposed to pardoning -- was the right thing to do. Morons who think that any of these guys will be "back on a streetcorner near you" anytime soon need to go get a frickin' dictionary. Somehow though, I just cannot accept that if he wasn't seriously worried about his "legacy" or possibly needing to inoculate himself against future prosecutions, his infallible moral compass would ever have led him to take such a huge step. He's the consumate politician, a real hack's hack. This guy was one of the most corrupt officials ever to inhabit the already seedy warrens of Springfield. During his tenure in office as Secretary of State, he had State of Illinois SoS employees taking bribes totalling over a quarter of a million dollars from incompetent and unqualified drivers in order to acquire commercial drivers licenses. Bribes that were fed straight into his campaign fund. In 1994, a truck driven by one of those unqualified drivers -- unqualfied by virtue of his poor comprension of the English language -- was driving South on I90 from Milwaukee. Hanging dangrously off the rear of the trailer was a three-foot section of I-beam which supported the taillights and mudflaps. The driver was unable to comprehend several warnings relayed by passing truckers. Soon the metal piece fell off. Behind the tractor-trailer was the minivan of Scott Willis, his wife, Janet, and their six children, aged 3 months to 12 years. Although the Willises were following at a safe distance, the beam was tumbling on the road and Scott was unable to evade it. It passed under the van and became lodged in the frame. One jagged end punctured through the fuel tank and tore up into the floor of the passenger compartment, spraying gas within. Sparks from the dragging metal quickly ignited the gas fumes. My soon-to-be wife's six nieces and nephews died that day. For eight years we have listened to George Ryan -- the consumate politician and fundraiser, a campaing control freak -- deny that he knew anything about the systematic cash-for-licensing scheme that inflated his campaign fund by a quarter of a million dollars. That he had NO IDEA where all that money came from. While everyone associated with him at the Secretary of State's office went down under a torrent of evidence and wistle-blowing the voters of Illinois elected him Governor, a governorship that was instantly haunted by federal prosecutors , personal injury lawyers, and the ghosts of those six children. And now, as he is about to pass out of office -- and pass from what little protection that office holds for him -- he has made a selfless and politically courageous act. He's still a crook and an accessory to manslaughter. And if there was one ounce of justice left in the justice system in the State of Illinois, he would leave the State House and be taken directly to the Big House.
Sorry to hear about that. But to many on here he will be remembered for his last cowardly act and will be lauded for it. I do hope he gets to share some quiet time with the fine denizens of an Illinois jail. I'm sure prosecutors are gunning for him now. Squeal pig!!
Actually, it's against Chicago City ordinances to have/own a gun with city limits. So we won't have anything to worry about. I feel so much safer in Chicago knowing that there are no guns in the city (except the legal ones the cops use).
Some facts about all this, not necessarily connected or related. --As mentioned above, George Ryan was a political hack; he may yet get his'n in the licenses for bribe scandals. --The criminal prosecutorial system, and by extension the application of the capital punishment, was broken (and may still be broken) in Illinois. Innocent people were on death row. --Guilty people are on death row. --The blanket commutation of death sentences was was (a) an act of moral courage; (b) an effort by Ryan to camouflage the corruption of his administration; (c) a huge publicity stunt, complete with Oprah appearances, designed to get Ryan lucrative speaking fees and post-governorship visibility; (d) all of the above.