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 was 91.
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.
But Mr. Ryan’s blanket commutation was questioned by conservative law-and-order groups and by families and friends of victims slain by people who ultimately landed on death row. Many said the moratorium amounted to a killers’ reprieve granted by a governor capriciously overturning settled court decisions.
Mr. Ryan, however, insisted that his moratorium was an act of conscience based on statistical evidence that people on death row in Illinois — guilty or not — were likely to be executed. He found himself in a media spotlight, being compared to his fellow Republican Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, who had presided over 135 executions in five years in office and who was running for president at the time.
An editorial in The New York Times, titled “Governor Ryan’s Brave Example,” said: “Mr. Ryan has made it politically acceptable for conservative Republicans and Democrats alike to rethink capital punishment and how it is carried out. Many politicians have avoided the issue for fear of being called soft on crime.”
Mr. Ryan was not the first governor to commute death-row sentences. After losing a 1970 re-election bid, Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas, a Republican, commuted the sentences of 15 condemned inmates; Gov. Toney Anaya of New Mexico, a Democrat, commuted five death sentences before leaving office in 1986; and Gov. Richard F. Celeste of Ohio, also a Democrat, commuted eight death sentences before departing in 1991. All opposed the death penalty, but none of their actions compared in scale with Mr. Ryan’s sweep.
Mr. Ryan named a blue-ribbon commission to re-examine cases that had led to wrongful convictions. It found that some defense lawyers had been less than competent, that judges had overlooked trial mistakes, and that death penalty statutes were a hodgepodge of contradictions needing an overhaul. The panel proposed reforms, including bans on death sentences for the mentally handicapped as well as in cases based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant or a single eyewitness.
Mr. Ryan did not seek re-election in 2002. Some political observers linked his demurral to a series of recent criminal convictions of former subordinates from his days as the Illinois secretary of state, and to reports that prosecutors were examining his conduct while in that position.
Months later, as his term ended, Mr. Ryan pardoned four death-row inmates whose innocence had been proved by new evidence. He then exercised the ultimate authority in his arsenal by commuting, to life terms, the death sentences of all 167 inmates still facing execution in Illinois. It was the largest commutation of death-row sentences in the nation’s history, and it stripped the Illinois death row bare of inmates.
He announced his decision in a speech before a large audience in a hall at the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago.
“I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” the governor said, quoting Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court. He added:
“The legislature couldn’t reform it. Lawmakers won’t repeal it. But I will not stand for it. I must act. Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.”
Mr. Ryan’s attack on capital punishment drew praise from world leaders, including Pope John Paul II and, in South Africa, former President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Mr. Ryan was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
But history was closing in on him.
The origins of his downfall lay in a decade-old federal corruption investigation called “Operation Safe Road.” It had uncovered the illegal sale of government contracts, leases and even driver’s licenses to incompetent truckers, some of whom were involved in fatal highway crashes. At least 79 people — former subordinates of Mr. Ryan, lobbyists and others — were implicated and charged with felonies. Nearly all were convicted and served prison terms.
In 2004, the investigation reached Mr. Ryan: He was accused of accepting $167,000 in cash, vacations and gifts for himself, his family and friends. Indicted on charges of fraud and racketeering, he was convicted on 18 counts after a five-month trial in 2006 and sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a term spent mostly at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. He was temporarily released in 2011 to visit his wife, Lura Lynn Ryan, in a hospital in Kankakee on the day she died of lung cancer.
Scott Turow, a lawyer, author and member of the commission that Mr. Ryan had named to review the state’s capital cases, posed a rhetorical question to reporters about the man who had plumbed the limits of power and disgrace: “Who was George Ryan?” Mr. Turow asked after the conviction. “It’s a question best put to Shakespeare.”
George Homer Ryan, the youngest of three children of Thomas and Jeanette (Bowman) Ryan, was born on Feb. 24, 1934, in Maquoketa, Iowa, where his mother’s family raised cattle. Months after his birth, his father earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Iowa and took a job with Walgreens, the drugstore chain.
After a brief posting at a Walgreens on the South Side of Chicago, Thomas Ryan was transferred to a store in Kankakee, a small city an hour’s drive south of Chicago, where the family settled and where George; his sister, Kathleen; and his brother, Tom, grew up and attended public schools. In 1947, the Ryans adopted 15-year-old Nancy Schrey after the death of her widowed father, Harry Schrey, a friend of the family.
In 1948, Thomas Ryan opened his own pharmacy in Kankakee. George, a freshman at Kankakee High School, worked there on lunch hours and weekends, making sodas, washing dishes and scrubbing floors. He also found time to play high school football and baseball.
“I worked the fountain and realized that if I was ever going to be an owner of the pharmacy, I had to be a pharmacist,” Mr. Ryan told Illinois Periodicals Online for a profile published in 1998. After graduating from Kankakee High in 1952, he worked full-time for his father, as did Tom, Kathleen and, after she married, her husband, Duane Dean. At one point, four Ryan pharmacies in the Kankakee area were operated by family members.
George was drafted by the Army in 1954. He spent 13 months in Korea, was discharged in 1956 and returned to the family business. In 1961, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacy from Ferris State College (now Ferris State University) in Big Rapids, Mich. He and his siblings were co-owners of the family drugstores until 1990, when the chain was sold.
While Mr. Ryan had his sights on politics, it was his brother, Tom Ryan, who jumped in first. He was elected mayor of Kankakee in 1965 and held the post for 20 years.
Mr. Ryan began his political career on the Kankakee County board of supervisors from 1968 to 1973. He was then elected to a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, serving from 1973 to 1983, with two terms as minority leader and one as speaker. Over the next 20 years, he was elected to the state’s highest offices, as lieutenant governor under Gov. James R. Thompson (1983-91); as a two-term secretary of state (1991-99); and finally as governor of Illinois (1999-2003).
Mr. Ryan defeated a five-term Democratic Illinois congressman, Glenn Poshard, for the governorship in 1998 with 51 percent of the vote to Mr. Poshard’s 47 percent.
Mr. Ryan’s most ambitious undertaking as governor was a $12 billion effort to rebuild the state’s roads, schools and transit systems. In 1999, he became the first sitting American governor to meet President Fidel Castro of Cuba in Havana. The next year, he was named chairman of the Midwestern Governors Association and the Illinois chairman of George W. Bush’s campaign for the presidency.
In 1956, he married his high school sweetheart, Lura Lynn Lowe, whose family owned one of the first hybrid seed companies in the United States.
In addition to his son, Mr. Ryan is survived by five daughters, Julie Koehl, Joanne Barrow, Jeanette Schneider, Lynda Fairman and Nancy Coghlan; 17 grandchildren; and 21 great-grandchildren.
The Illinois death penalty was abolished on March 9, 2011, with Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, signing the legislation. The 15 people then on death row had their sentences commuted to life in prison.
No one had been executed in Illinois since Mr. Ryan’s moratorium in 2000.
Mr. Ryan could not attend the signing ceremony; he was still incarcerated in Terre Haute, with a couple of years left on his sentence. He was released on Jan. 30, 2013, and returned home to Kankakee, where he remained under house arrest until July 3, 2013.
Mr. Ryan wrote a book, “Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois” (2020, with Maurice Possley), which traced his conversion from supporter of capital punishment to, in his words, “the man who almost single-handedly brought it down.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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