Until I Could Be Sure by Sr. George H. Ryan Sr

Author:Sr. George H. Ryan Sr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Critics Everywhere

It didn’t take long for the political season to begin with people announcing their candidacies and calling for an end to the moratorium. Republican state senator Patrick O’Malley, who actually had declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor back in June, weighed in almost immediately.

“We have a governor who is apparently confused or indifferent as to what the law in Illinois is,” O’Malley said. “He does not have the right to ignore the law by a process of executive nullification.” Moreover, O’Malley claimed I had dreamed up the moratorium as a public relations maneuver when all I had to do was just stay any executions that came up.

O’Malley also went after Illinois attorney general Jim Ryan, who was also running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. “By not seeking dates of execution of persons justly convicted of capital crimes, Attorney General Ryan is not providing for ‘timely disposition’ of these cases. As such, the families of these crime victims are not getting justice,” O’Malley declared. “Attorney General Ryan should no longer hide behind the governor’s moratorium, nor should the governor hide behind the attorney general’s failure to seek execution dates.”

O’Malley quoted Will County Circuit Court judge Herman Haase, who had criticized me during a sentencing hearing earlier in the year, saying, “If we are going to have a death penalty and a death sentence law that is not carried out as to the most vicious serial killers, to killers of police officers in the line of duty, to multiple murderers, then I think we have to ask ourselves a question: What are we doing?”

O’Malley said that if I wanted to get rid of the death penalty, I should go to the General Assembly. It was a cheap shot and he knew it. I wasn’t trying to get rid of the death penalty system—I had appointed a commission to try to fix it.

I refused to sit on my hands on this issue. I fired right back.

“If this fella wants to be governor of the State of Illinois, he ought to have his facts straight, and he hasn’t,” I said. “It would be the worst thing to ever happen to Illinois if he ever got elected governor of the state. He’s an ideologue that’s got tunnel vision and doesn’t understand what it takes to be governor of the State of Illinois. And I would certainly hope nobody would support him.”

Joseph Birkett, the DuPage County state’s attorney who announced he was running for the Republican nomination for Illinois attorney general, also said it was time to lift the moratorium.

“I know that we have the fairest system of capital punishment in the nation. I think it is time to move on with capital punishment,” Birkett declared at a news conference. Birkett, of course, had been a critic of the moratorium since the day I imposed it. He said I could have individually halted executions and that there was no need for a moratorium. In any event, now he was saying that the system had been fixed and the flaws had been corrected.

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