Gov. Ryan's Big Moment
by Bob Cook

Not every governor could have got away with overcoming 25 years of increasing political bloodlust for the death penalty by commuting the sentences of every condemned prisoner in the state, as George Ryan did in Illinois. Only a governor truly beholden to no one could get away with it — and, thanks to a scandal that could well end up in his indictment, Ryan was that governor.

The scandal, known colloquially as "licenses for bribes," turned Ryan from the state's ultimate Republican insider to the party's ultimate pariah, and Republicans themselves couldn't run fast enough to distance themselves from him as indictments and convictions piled up — 57 and 51, respectively, by the count of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

Ryan — forced to give up his office after one term, so disgraced that recent Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan identified himself is ads only as "Jim" — has raised a big middle finger to the state on his way out. He's packed dubious boards with well-paid political cronies and tried to use state money to buy office buildings owned by old friends. He did little to address the state's budget deficit, right now at $5 billion and growing.

This is not to suggest Ryan emptied death row merely out of spite. His moratorium on the death penalty, established in 2000 after a baker's dozen of inmates were freed when new evidence proved their innocence, came before the scandal dominated the news in Illinois. And, other than four inmates who were set free because of evidence their confessions were obtained through police coercion and four whose terms were reduced to 30-40 years, every death row inmate — 163 of them — is getting the dubious prize of life without parole. But certainly to the families of those former death row inmates' victims — if, at this point, we can presume the rest of those inmates are guilty — Ryan's decision fit in with his recent screw-you approach.

Even in Illinois, a state used to venal officeholders, the scandal Ryan has enmeshed himself in has shocked the electorate. The part about Department of Vehicle Services offices trading licenses for bribes (that were then directed to Ryan's campaign fund while he oversaw the DVS as secretary of state) would be garden-variety chicanery, except that it resulted in several deaths — in particular, six children in a van in Wisconsin. The scandal broke when the parents of those children (killed in 1994 when a metal part fell off a truck), received anonymous phone calls informing them that the truck's driver was using one of those fraudulent licenses.

Ryan's Democratic opponent in the 1998 gubernatorial election, Glenn Poshard, tried to use the scandal as a campaign issue. But with little court activity at the time, Poshard was dismissed as a crank and lost to Ryan, a pharmacist from Kankakee who had been working his way up Illinois politics for 30 years before his inauguration as governor.

The indictments and convictions soon piled up, however, and those indicted and convicted began getting closer and closer to Ryan. In fact, Ryan is widely believed to be the "Official A" named in court documents as a knowing beneficiary of kickbacks from the licenses-for-bribes scheme.

Under pressure from state Republicans, Ryan pulled out of the 2002 gubernatorial race, but somehow it seemed he was still running. George Ryan was the main issue in the Republican primary, especially with the presence of state Attorney General Jim Ryan as one of the candidates. State Sen. Patrick O'Malley, an underdog conservative candidate, not only accused Jim Ryan of doing little to ferret out corruption under George Ryan, but he even aired a TV ad in which Jim Ryan's faced morphed into George Ryan's. (Using a word not heard since "Batman" went off the air in 1968, O'Malley accused Jim Ryan of protecting George Ryan and his "henchmen.") The taint of George Ryan, who ignored Jim Ryan's pleas to resign from office, spread over the whole Republican party — it lost every state office except treasurer, and it lost control of the state Senate. (It already was a minority in the state House.) Ryan can expect no dinners honoring his governorship.

George Ryan's critics say his decision to commute death sentences — made after weeks of hearings featuring wrenching emotional testimony from victims' and convicts' families — is just an attempt to restore what otherwise would be a tainted legacy. Everywhere but Illinois may someday know Ryan as the man who turned the tide against the death penalty. But at the same time, if Ryan hadn't been shunned by his own kind in the first place, he may not have had the fortitude to save the lives of others.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.