Gov. George Ryan said he unintentionally misled the families and friends of those slain by Death Row murderers when he told them he was leaning away from a blanket clemency.
That was the position he shared with more than 100 victims’ family members at a December meeting. In his speech Saturday, he said that as recent as a week ago he thought he would not grant mercy to every Death Row inmate. But then, he said, he changed his mind.
“They have a right to feel betrayed,” he said in an interview after his speech, blaming his own vacillation. “I have probably misled them, certainly not intentionally . . . I apologize to those people.”
Many friends and family members of murder victims did not accept that apology. They said they believe Ryan had intended from the start to pardon or commute the sentence of every condemned prisoner, and that the move was designed to divert attention from his administration’s corruption scandals.
“I just think it’s political tactics,” said Helen Sophie Rajca of Bolingbrook, whose two brothers were stabbed and shot to death in 1979. “I just don’t believe it. It’s not right what he did. He’s got too many things following him. This is just to blindside everybody from what he’s done.”
As Ryan spoke to cheers and applause at Northwestern University School of Law, some family members of the slain watched at home with barely restrained fury. When the governor introduced his wife to the crowd, May Laughlin, a 61-year-old Chicago woman whose daughter was strangled in 1990, shouted at her television: “I’d like to introduce my daughter too, you bastard.” Others were more subdued with their anger, saying they figured long ago that Ryan would grant a blanket commutation.
“It was clear from Day 1 that his mind was made up,” said Wheeling Police Sgt. Bill Stutzman, whose colleague Kenneth Dawson was killed in 1985. “[Ryan] has shown no respect to the victims’ families, to police, prosecutors, judges. What he’s done is a tragedy and it’s based on a personal agenda.”
Personal experience
During his speech, Ryan said he and his wife Lura Lynn had lost a close friend to a Death Row murderer. Stephen Small, a newspaper publisher in Ryan’s hometown of Kankakee, was abducted from his home by Daniel Edwards in 1987 and put in a plywood box Edwards had been buried just below the surface of the ground.
Edwards intended to hold Small, heir to his family’s media fortune, for ransom, but the father of three suffocated and died. Ryan said his wife was angered and disappointed at his decision to spare Edwards, “like many of the families of other victims will be.
“I share this story with you so that you know I do not come to this as a neophyte without having experienced a small bit of the bitter pill the survivors of murder must swallow,” Ryan said.
The governor also mentioned the case of Kankakee cop killer Eric Lee. Although he said there was no doubt Lee had murdered police officer Anthony Samfay during a 1996 traffic stop, Ryan said it was clear that Lee, 23, was mentally ill at the time of the murder.
Though he knew Lee’s family, Ryan said he could not send another man’s son to death under what he called Illinois’ deeply flawed capital punishment system.
Ryan said after his speech that even though he told victims’ families he was leaning away from blanket clemency, he tried to be careful not to rule it out. But he acknowledged that may not have been clear.
“I told the families it was on the front burner, the back burner, that I wouldn’t do it at all,” he said. “I’m hoping that they have an understanding of the process that I have been through and my obligation is far broader than their desires and their wishes.”
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Ryan said he held to his pledge to consider each case individually. But many victims’ family members do not believe he did that.
“I think all the cases are being punished because of a few. If he had reviewed them each individually, he would see that some of the cases were done on the up and up,” said James Dudovick, father of Dawn Dudovick. In 1988, she was stabbed 40 times by William Peeples, whose guilt has been established by DNA evidence.
“There was no way they could have reviewed these cases to find out what was the right thing to do,” said Dawn Pueschel, who lost her brother and his wife to murder in 1983.
Notorious cases
While Ryan’s mass clemency spared the lives of inmates who maintain their innocence, it applied equally to those who acknowledged their guilt. And it meant the state’s most notorious convicted killers will never be executed.
Fedell Caffey and his former girlfriend, Jacqueline Williams, were on Death Row for killing Addison resident Debra Evans, her two children and cutting a full-term fetus from Evans’ womb. Evans’ brother, Sam Evans Jr., said Ryan’s decision means his family will never gain any peace.
“He’s seen to it that us and all of the families waiting will never have that final closure,” he said. “We’ve been robbed of our justice. He cannot state that there was any error whatsoever in our specific case. It was just wrong. There’s no other way of putting it.”
Gregory Jackson, father of an 11-year-old boy who was slain with his mother as they slept in 1987, said he understood the need for clemency in certain cases, but that blanket sentence commutations were hard to take.
“I don’t want an innocent person to die. I don’t want anyone to go through what I’ve gone through,” he said. ” . . . But I feel cheated. I feel cheated by the governor and I feel cheated by the detective and the system that caused this mess. It’s a cesspool.”
Some had received the news they dreaded early. On Friday, when Ryan pardoned four men he said had been wrongly convicted, Michael Jointer was left wondering when his brother would receive justice.
“I’m very perturbed. This is an injustice to me and my family,” said 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 Friday. “If they didn’t do it, who did?”
Conflicted kin
Not everyone whose case was settled by the governor Saturday was angry about the decision. At Ryan’s post-speech press conference, a woman named Patty Davis stood and said: “There were four members of my family that were murdered by James Ashford . . . I can say my family has to support his decision. Any time there are 17 men exonerated for something they didn’t do, our system must be flawed and we support the governor’s position.”
Others said they were conflicted. Larry Happ’s daughter, Debbie, was murdered in Chicago in 1997. The Springfield, Mo., resident accepted the sentence commutation of William Riley, his daughter’s killer, saying he did not support the idea of capital punishment. But he did not like how the governor reached his decision.
“The issue that still hangs with me is how this was conducted and the issues of emotional distress that everyone had to go back through to get to this point,” he said.
And even with Ryan’s declaration Saturday, some families felt they were left in limbo. Tony Dameron, convicted in 1998 of killing his 3-month-old daughter Rachel, was one of a handful of prisoners whose death sentences had been tossed out by the courts but received commutations from Ryan anyway.
Ryan’s authority to do that is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, so Laura Eastman, Rachel’s aunt, wasn’t sure when her family’s ordeal would end.
“We’re very frustrated,” he said. “I guess George Ryan is now the best friend of child killers in Illinois.”
Fearful feelings
While Ryan said he hoped the family members of victims would ultimately turn away from “the hope of revenge,” some said it wasn’t revenge they wanted. It was safety.
Andrew Johnson, who killed William Feuling in a West Side robbery, made an escape attempt from the Cook County Jail just before his sentencing in 1986. Feuling’s niece, Shannon Feuling-Sheppard, said clemency meant Johnson might get another chance someday.
“[Ryan] said he’d be able to sleep better now,” she said. “Well, he’s got a lot of families not sleeping now, because they can be threatened by these men. He can’t guarantee that they won’t escape.”