When Gov. George Ryan learned at 12:34 a.m. Wednesday that Andrew Kokoraleis was dead, he finally was able to get some uneasy sleep after the most harrowing day of his administration.
And when the governor woke up, he said he still did not doubt Kokoraleis’ guilt. But he wondered whether Illinois residents still had as much faith as he did in the death penalty.
“I always thought he was guilty,” Ryan said Wednesday. “But because there was a public discussion about maybe a change in the (death penalty) law before the General Assembly and because 11 guys were found innocent after being found guilty, I had some second thoughts. It just took me some time to come to grips with it.”
After the state and U.S. Supreme Courts had refused to block Kokoraleis’ execution, the decision to proceed was entirely Ryan’s. And as the governor considered whether to proceed or issue a stay or even commute the convicted murderer’s sentence, questions haunted him:
Was Kokoraleis guilty? Did he have legitimate grounds for an appeal? Did he deserve the ultimate punishment? And was there any doubt that the justice system had worked properly?
“It’s a very hard personal decision to make,” Ryan said. “You can talk about it summarily, like `fry the guy,’ but when you’re the guy who pushes the plunger, it’s a different story.”
By late afternoon Tuesday, Ryan had aides begin typing a statement that issued a three-month reprieve for Kokoraleis, even though the governor still believed the Villa Park man was guilty of the mutilation and murder of Elmhurst secretary Lorraine Borowski, 21.
But by 7 p.m., after consulting with aides and taking calls from political and legal leaders, Ryan changed his mind. Kokoraleis would die.
And so, barely a half hour into Wednesday morning, Kokoraleis was pronounced dead after receiving an injection of a lethal combination of drugs, his sentence for the 1982 mutilation and murder of Borowski.
In his final moments Kokoraleis told Borowski’s family that he was “sorry for your loss,” but did not acknowledge responsibility for the woman’s death.
He also cited biblical passages that denounce putting innocent men to death and then quoted one verse to the witnesses: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
It was the first execution at the Tamms Correctional Center, the state’s supermaximum-security prison in far Downstate Illinois, and the first under Ryan’s watch.
Ryan, who throughout his public career has supported capital punishment, said he had an idea about what caused his initial indecision: The ongoing debate over the death penalty, fueled the recent case of Anthony Porter, a Death Row inmate who was set free after another man confessed to a double killing.
Yet Ryan said he realized that he had to put political issues aside and keep them from “clouding my opinion.”
Instead, he said he tried to decide Kokoraleis’ fate purely along the lines of guilt or innocence while making sure “the system hasn’t failed.”
“I considered every option, including a stay and a commutation (of the death sentence to life in prison),” Ryan said. “But once I made up my mind and thought he was guilty and the crimes he had done, it was my only obligation to make sure he was guilty.”
He added: “I feel that I did the right thing. I know I did.”
Ryan’s former chief of staff, Scott Fawell, who remains one of the governor’s most trusted advisers, said he tried to help Ryan sort through his conflicting thoughts, including the early decision to issue a 90-day stay.
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“I asked him, `Are you staying this because you want a little more time? You can’t just keep staying it, because there’ll be a second one, then a third one,’ ” Fawell said. “The reality is there’s more to come, and at some point you have to make a decision.”
At one point, Fawell said he pointed out that Kokoraleis was perhaps one of the least sympathetic candidates for clemency that Ryan would ever encounter.
“This was a pretty brutal, sadistic killing, and random at that,” Fawell said he told Ryan. “If you agree with the death penalty, there is not a better candidate coming down the pike.”
But in the aftermath of Kokoraleis’ execution, Ryan wondered whether the public should confront the larger issue of capital punishment–especially after watching 11 men who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death go free since 1977, the year the death penalty was reinstated in Illinois.
“I think that eventually has to become the debate: Does society want a death penalty?” Ryan said. “We maybe have to look at whether, under stricter circumstances, we should have a death penalty.”
Although Ryan insisted that he had eliminated political considerations from his decision, some death-penalty critics suggested otherwise.
“I’m glad (Ryan’s) gut wrenched, but I’m sorry that in the last analysis, he shrugged his shoulders,” said Locke Bowman, legal director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School.
“He could have said, `I think Kokoraleis should be executed, but I want to begin a process of review and study of the death penalty in Illinois because I’m concerned about it,’ ” Bowman said.
Some of that review process may soon be under way. Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan, whom the governor consulted with in deliberating Kokoraleis’ execution, is considering a closed-door forum sometime in the next few weeks to give those who handle death-penalty cases a chance to air concerns about the process, aides said Wednesday.
The attorney general and Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine have already added a new layer of review in capital cases, partly in response to the Porter case. And Dan Curry, a spokesman for the attorney general, said those steps and other new safeguards would prevent the governor from having to wrestle with questions of innocence in the future.
“If there’s a problem with a case, then that needs to be resolved before it gets to the governor,” Curry said. “The intent is to catch actual innocence issues before they get as close to an execution as Anthony Porter got.”
Charles Hoffman, assistant state appellate defender, said he did not doubt the attorney general took a good-faith look at each case. But he said asking state prosecutors to act as a legal safety net was “like asking the fox to take another look and make sure the hens are OK.”
Despite calls for a moratorium on executions to allow a review of death penalty cases, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Carl Hawkinson (R-Galesburg) said most legislators oppose the idea.
And Hawkinson noted that the state now has in place a “de facto kind of moratorium” because no executions are scheduled for at least three months.
By the time the state’s next execution is scheduled, he expects lawmakers will have passed a handful of proposals, including increased funding for appellate defenders.
As questions linger about the state’s capital punishment law, there was no debate in Ray Borowski’s mind early Wednesday.
The father of Kokoraleis’ victim, joined by other tearful family members and friends at the Tamms prison, thanked the governor for carrying out the execution.
“We can now anticipate some relief and attempt to continue on with our lives, always remembering that justice has been served,” Borowski said.