As Gov. George Ryan stood in a packed DePaul University law school auditorium pardoning four men on Death Row, a woman sat silently outside the door, thinking of her murdered son.
Naomi Michael Clark wanted to hear Ryan’s speech in person, to make sure that among the pardoned, he didn’t name Ralph Harris, the man who confessed to killing her son.
But she wasn’t allowed into to the auditorium, where Ryan’s speech was greeted with cheers and applause by death penalty foes.
On Saturday, she was to attend another speech by the governor, where she and other relatives of murdered men, women and children expect Ryan to extend sweeping clemency to the convicted killers.
“I just want closure,” she said. “Hearing it would give me some closure. Whether Harris lives or dies is not the issue. He just should never be released again.”
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Almost without exception, Ryan’s declarations of clemency are producing heartache and anger in the survivors. Four men were pardoned Friday–Harris was not among them. On Saturday, Ryan was poised to commute 156 death sentences to terms of life in prison.
“I don’t understand this man’s brain,” said Robert Weides, father of murder victim Jeffrey Weides. “He’s dirtier than the murderers. He actually thinks he’s doing the right thing. How deluded can you be?”
For many families, the expectation that their loved ones’ killers would receive clemency was the latest heart-rending event in a process that began in March, when Ryan first said he would consider commuting the sentence of every inmate on Death Row to life behind bars after 13 condemned prisoners were exonerated.
That statement set off an avalanche of clemency requests from the inmates’ lawyers and ended in nine days of emotional hearings in October. As defense attorneys pressed for mercy, family members pleaded against it with often wrenching testimony.
After the hearings began, Ryan said he was leaning against blanket clemency, though he would not rule it out. He repeated that to a gathering of more than 100 victims’ family members last month.
“The family members really thought he meant it. I did not,” said Dawn Pueschel, whose brother and sister-in-law were slain in their Rogers Park home in 1983.
Numerous members of her family testified against Reginald and Jerry Mahaffey, the men convicted of the crime, on the first day of clemency hearings. That included Richard Dean Pueschel, who as an 11-year-old boy survived the attack that took his parents’ life.
“Please, please, let it finally be over,” Richard Dean Pueschel begged members of the Prisoner Review Board, which conducted the hearings and made non-binding clemency recommendations to Ryan.
If the governor grants blanket clemency, a bitter Dawn Pueschel said the family’s pleas will have been in vain.
“This to me has been completely planned out,” she said. Ryan “has stretched this out to the very last minute. I’ve said several times to his office he has no common decency. How could you treat victims’ family members like this?”
Hayward Roy lost his father to murder when he was 18. Now 29, he, too, was not surprised at what appeared to be a decision for mercy for all condemned inmates.
“I really felt like his mind was made up a long time ago,” Roy said. “The process we went through was a little dog-and-pony show. It makes me sad to say that I’m a Republican. … If he would have taken the time to look at all the cases, there would have been more than one that he shouldn’t overturn.”
Some family members still clung to a scrap of optimism that their cases would be different.
“We still have hope,” said Shannon Feuling-Sheppard, whose uncle William Feuling was slain in a 1985 West Side robbery. “We still hear that he’s maybe doing blanket clemency for three-fourths (of the inmates).”
Maybe, she said, her uncle’s murderer would be one of the rumored exceptions.
Some families were particularly on edge since their cases occupied a gray area. Courts have thrown out death sentences for 14 inmates, but their attorneys sought clemency anyway, hoping to avoid the possibility of execution when their clients are resentenced.
Whether the governor can spare those inmates is a matter of dispute, so Laura Eastman, aunt of a 3-month-old girl beaten to death in Kane County, wasn’t sure that a clemency declaration would mark the end of her family’s ordeal.
She lashed out at the governor, saying that if Ryan spared her niece’s killer, Tony Dameron, he did not live up to his pledge to consider cases individually.
“There was no question of [Dameron’s] guilt,” she said. “There was no allegation of coercion, of these things we’re hearing from other people.”
For some families, there was no suspense Friday, only frustration after Ryan pardoned the men once convicted of killing their loved ones.
“I’m very perturbed. This is an injustice to me and the rest of my family,” said Michael Jointer, whose sister Michelle was one of four people murdered in a South Side apartment in 1985. Leroy Orange, who along with his half-brother was convicted of the crime, won a pardon after Ryan cited allegations of a torture-spawned confession.
Jointer said he remained certain that Orange had been involved in the crime.
“This was a premeditated act by both of them. One person could not have committed all those murders,” Jointer said after Ryan’s speech. “If they didn’t do it, who did?”
Gayla Ridgell Redmond reacted more with sadness than outrage. She is the daughter of Oliver Ridgell, the man Stanley Howard was convicted of murdering. Ryan pardoned Howard, who remains incarcerated because of other crimes, because of his torture allegation and other problems with evidence.
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“I’m not an advocate of the death penalty, so I wasn’t looking for him to be executed,” said Redmond. “But for him to be totally pardoned of the crime–I can’t say I’m too happy.”
Still, she added, “No matter what happens, it won’t bring my dad back.”
Some family members had no quarrel with Friday’s pardons, saying some cases might well deserve mercy. But they were angry that every Death Row inmate might be spared, saying Ryan clearly did not consider each case on its merits.
“Why should he live? He’s guilty,” Carol Lynn DeWitt said of Donald Armstrong, convicted of bludgeoning DeWitt’s 80-year-old aunt to death on the West Side in 1992. ” … I hope this governor has some kind of heart to know what he’s been doing to [the families].”