Gov. George Ryan has begun his review of Prisoner Review Board recommendations for the nearly 160 Death Row prisoners seeking commutations to life in prison, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
The Prisoner Review Board, which held nearly two weeks of hearings on the capital cases last month, forwarded case summaries, analyses, its votes and final recommendations to Ryan on Friday night, said Dennis Culloton, Ryan’s spokesman.
Ryan began reviewing the cases over the weekend, he added.
“He has started to review their recommendations, just as he and his staff have been reviewing these cases the last three years,” Culloton said.
The board also forwarded its recommendations in the cases of former Death Row inmates Rolando Cruz and Gary Gauger, both of whom were exonerated after spending years on Death Row or in prison.
Tuesday, Ryan said he has made up his mind about the Cruz case, but the governor declined to say whether he will grant a pardon.
Cruz was twice convicted but later cleared in the 1983 murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, who was abducted from her Naperville home, raped and murdered. DuPage County State’s Atty. Joe Birkett says recent DNA tests point to the involvement of another man in the murder. That man, Brian Dugan, is serving a life sentence for unrelated murders. Dugan has not been charged in the Nicarico case.
The review by Ryan and his staff is the final step of a process that began earlier in the year, when Ryan said at a death penalty conference in Oregon that he would consider commuting the sentences of all Death Row inmates to life in prison without possibility of parole.
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The clemency recommendations now before the governor are the result of a series of hearings by the Prisoner Review Board, the panel charged with scrutinizing the cases. Following hours of testimony, in which defense attorneys, prosecutors and victims’ families argued over the cases, board members voted on the cases.
The governor also is scheduled to talk with the families of murder victims in meetings in Chicago and Springfield in the next few weeks.
The Republican governor, who in January 2000 declared a moratorium on executions, has said that he would act on the Death Row cases before he leaves office during the second week of January.
He also is backing legislation to reform the death penalty system. A commission Ryan appointed to study and reform the death penalty issued its report earlier this year with 85 proposals to improve the system.
Thirteen people have been freed from Illinois’ Death Row after serious questions were raised about their guilt. The state has executed 12 people since the death penalty was reinstated in Illinois in 1977.