CHICAGO, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- It's been two years since Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executing death row inmates.
Now 157 men and women convicted of capital crimes will get a chance beginning Tuesday to convince the outgoing governor to commute their sentences. Three other inmates declined to participate in the review process.
Illinois has exonerated more condemned murders than it has executed, 13 vs. 12 -- a fact that gave Ryan, a former proponent of the death penalty, pause.
Among the more notorious cases under consideration will be those of Interstate 57 killer Henry Brisbon, who killed a pair of motorists during a robbery and once boasted he would kill fellow inmates so the state would have to keep postponing his execution so he could be tried, and Jaqueline Williams, who was convicted of cutting another woman's full-term baby out of her womb, killing two of the woman's other children and claiming the newborn as her own.
The Illinois Prisoner Review Board will hear 18 cases a day beginning Tuesday and running through Friday in Chicago and six a day in Springfield. More hearings are scheduled for Oct. 21, 23, 24 and 28.
Attorney General Jim Ryan lost a lawsuit to prevent the hearings from being held, going up against both the current governor and former Gov. James Thompson, who was recruited to represent George Ryan. Thompson is a former U.S. attorney.
The attorney general tried to get Thompson disqualified because his law firm represents some of the inmates seeking clemency. Thompson responded that the bigger conflict of interest is the attorney general suing his client, the governor.
"(The governor) welcomes the attorney general's newfound concern for fairness and justice," the prisoner review board said in a statement. "However, Governor Ryan believes that his entire review of the capital punishment system now and in the future is constitutional, and, more importantly, the only right, moral and just thing to do."
The issue is kind of touchy for Jim Ryan. He put two of the already exonerated inmates on death row -- one of them twice. The case involved the 1983 kidnap-rape-bludgeoning death of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville. It ended when one of the sheriff's department officials involved in the case admitted during the third trial of Rolando Cruz some of the evidence had been fabricated.
In 1995, DNA evidence proved Cruz and two other men originally charged in the case had not raped the girl but the DNA did match that of another man, Brian Duggan, who had long ago offered to confess to the crime if prosecutors would take the death penalty off the table. Duggan never was prosecuted for the Nicarico killing although he is serving life sentences for two similar crimes.
Donna Jacobs, a Belleville mother whose daughter was strangled by an intruder eight years ago, said she is incensed at the thought her daughter's killer might avoid execution.
"There's no way I want that man to remain on the Earth," she recently told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Madison County State's Attorney Bill Haine plans to oppose clemency in all seven cases from his jurisdiction.
"There is not a shred of evidence that anyone on death row presently is innocent," Haine told the Post-Dispatch. "(Governor Ryan) is committing treason against the state and the constitution he swore to uphold.
"To entertain a mass clemency outside the due process of law will do irreparable damage to the fabric of the constitutional rule of law in Illinois for decades to come."
In Chicago, the Cook County state's attorney's office said it planned to oppose clemency in the 80 cases it will have before the board.
