George H. Ryan, the Illinois governor who reopened a national debate over capital punishment in 2000 by imposing a moratorium on death-row executions in his state, and who later went to prison for taking bribes in an earlier role as the Illinois secretary of state, died on Friday at his home in Kankakee, Ill. He was91.
His death was confirmed by his son, George H. Ryan Jr.
Citing “a shameless record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row,” Governor Ryan, a moderate Republican who, like most Americans, had long favored capital punishment, defended his decision to suspend the death penalty in Illinois on Jan. 31 as an act of conscience.
Barely a year into his single four-year term, Mr. Ryan said that since 1977, when the Illinois death penalty was reinstated after a federal pause, the state’s capital punishment system had been rife with grievous error. Of 25 inmates who had been placed on death row in that time, he said, 12 had been executed but 13 had been sent there for crimes they did not commit and were later exonerated and released.
“I cannot support a system which in its administration has proved so fraught with error, and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state’s taking of innocent life,” he said.
He added, “Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate.”
The moratorium was hailed by opponents of capital punishment, who said that wrongful death-penalty cases were common in America, often corrupted by issues of race, poverty, bad lawyering and police or prosecutorial misconduct. Contemporary research has suggested that 70 percent of fully reviewed capital cases contain reversible errors.
