Ryan urges end to death penalty

DePaul speech may be last before prison

Making his last scheduled public appearance before he reports to federal prison in January, former Gov. George Ryan on Friday night urged 500 DePaul University students to fight for the abolition of the death penalty.

Ryan appeared at a screening of a documentary, "Race to Execution," which focused on racial inequities of the death penalty. In Texas, a black person convicted of killing a white person is 30 times more likely to get the death penalty than a white person convicted of killing a black person, the documentary noted.

"All my life I believed in the death penalty and I thought it was the right system and it was done by people who knew what they were doing ... and I was wrong," Ryan said to cheers. "Now I'm an abolitionist. The death penalty is arbitrary, capricious, unjust, racist and unfair to the poor. We need to have a national and an international moratorium on the death penalty."

Ryan took no questions before or after his appearance. He and his wife, Lura Lynn, his son and other family members attended the screening as a favor to DePaul Professor Andrea Lyon, one of Ryan's defense lawyers who literally sat at his right hand through his entire 8-month trial. Lyon's sister Rachel Lyon made the film.

"The death penalty is one of our government's big lies," Lyon said. "They say it deters crime. It doesn't deter crime. They say it saves money. It doesn't save money. It costs two or three times as much to kill someone as it does to convict someone and keep them in prison. The death penalty's purpose is primarily a political purpose. The first motion I file in any murder case is a motion to continue this case to an odd-numbered year because I don't want my client and my case part of somebody's political campaign."

The documentary focused on the cases of Madison Hobley, a Chicago man convicted of setting a fire that killed his wife and son, and Robert Tarver, an Alabama man convicted of shooting a shopkeeper. Both were black men convicted by juries with 11 white jurors. Tarver was put to death. Hobley was pardoned by Ryan.

Hobley took the stage Friday night and thanked Ryan, saying "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here."

In an apparent reference to Ryan's impending imprisonment for 6½ years for his conviction on public corruption charges, Hobley said, "If there's a God who can touch a Republican governor, who once believed in the death penalty, and make him believe . . . then there's a God that can see that you're going to be all right."

The audience applauded.

"I'm praying for you, Gov. Ryan," Hobley said.

"Thank you," Ryan replied.

Ryan has denied many times that he became a death penalty opponent to distract attention from the corruption charges he was convicted of earlier this year.

Ryan echoed Lyon's argument that the death penalty exists because of politics, saying the reason he commuted the death sentences of everyone on Illinois' Death Row was because legislators didn't have the political courage to pass the reforms of the state's criminal justice system recommended by his commission of experts.

apallasch@suntimes.com