Death Penalty News

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, disgraced by a corruption scandal that landed him in prison yet heralded by some for clearing the state’s death row, has died. He was 91. Kankakee County Coroner Robert Gessner, a family friend, said Ryan died Friday afternoon at his home in Kankakee, where he was receiving hospice care. Ryan started out a small-town pharmacist but wound up running one of the country’s largest states. Along the way, the tough-on-crime Republican experienced a conversion on the death penalty and won international praise by halting executions as governor and, eventually, emptying death row.

On Dec. 19, Kevin Ray Underwood became the last person executed in 2024 . Oklahoma put him to death for the 2006 murder of 10-year-old Jamie Rose Rolin. Six days earlier, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board met to consider Underwood’s request for clemency. He appeared via video conference and “apologized to Bolin’s family, his family, and those in the hearing room who had to listen to the details of the crime.” Underwood told the board that he has “blocked out most of his memory of that day. ‘But when I do think about it, it causes me great pain.’”

BATON ROUGE, La. — For the first time, Louisiana is on the precipice of emptying death row. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards is using his clemency power to help advance a mass request for commutations after he publicly called on state lawmakers to stop the death penalty months ago. But time is running out. The governor leaves office in January. Emboldened by Edwards’ comments on capital punishment, all but one of the state’s 57 people on death row asked the governor in June to spare their lives by commuting their sentences to life without parole.

Louisiana’s death penalty saga continues. Two steps forward, one step back, on the road toward abolition. The latest step forward came last Wednesday, when Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards exercised his executive authority and ordered the state’s clemency board to hold hearings on the petitions filed by 56 death row inmates this summer. His order tees up the possibility that, before he leaves office next January, Edwards may be able to issue the largest mass commutation in this country since Illinois Gov. George Ryan emptied his state’s death row in 2003.

As Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards (pictured) considers the clemency petitions filed by 51 of the state’s 57 death row prisoners, advocates and journalists have noted the similarities between Louisiana’s death penalty system and that of Illinois, where Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of all 167 people on death row in 2003. Both states have had high numbers of death row exonerations stemming from systemic misconduct, death sentences in both states are concentrated in a small number of jurisdictions, and both governors have expressed serious personal concerns about the use of capital punishment.

Like President Joe Biden, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards now says he is opposed to the death penalty and that he would like to see it abolished. While Biden equivocates, Gov. Edwards has an opportunity to turn his words into meaningful action. If he does so, the Democratic governor of a deep red state may offer an example for the president to follow. Edwards has been afforded this opportunity by 51 of Louisiana’s 57 death row inmates who, last week, filed requests for clemency with the Board of Pardons and Committee on Paroles. This unusual coordinated action is the first step in a process that affords Edwards the chance to take a large bite out of the state’s death row.

January 11, 2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of former Illinois Governor George Ryan’s decision to grant clemency to every death row prisoner in Illinois, the largest blanket clemency in the modern era of the death penalty. It was a watershed moment in both Illinois’ criminal justice history and in the ongoing national conversation about the death penalty.

A former Illinois death row inmate whose exoneration became an incentive to end the death penalty in Illinois has died A former death row inmate—whose exoneration led to the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois—has died at 66. Anthony Porter died this week, his former attorney Jim Montgomery told WBBM Radio. "Tony had a pretty tough lifestyle. He was a man who came up on the street and did not make much changes in his lifestyle from the time he exited the penitentiary," Montgomery said. According to Cook County Medical Examiner's Office, Porter died from an "anoxic brain injury, probable opioid toxicity." His death was ruled an accident. Porter was sentenced to death for the 1982 murder of a teenage couple, Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green, in a park on Chicago's South Side. In 1998, he was two days away from being executed when a judge granted a stay after his attorneys argued that his low IQ meant he was not capable of understanding why he was being e...

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on federal executions and a new study of death penalty procedures last week. The move is a small step that fails to make good on President Joe Biden’s campaign promises to end capital punishment. Following on the heels of the Justice Department‘s effort to restore Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence, Garland’s announcement sends a muddled message about what the administration wants to do about capital punishment. Together, these two actions suggest that there is not much courage behind the administration’s rhetorical anti–death penalty commitments. Opponents of the death penalty should expect and demand more while the current Democratic administration is in office. Recent history cautions that announcing a moratorium is often a substitute for rather than a step toward ending capital punishment. It saves lives for the time it is in place, but a moratorium is easily reversed if and when a pro–death penalty admi...

A growing number of conservative lawmakers want to overhaul capital punishment, or end it. 2 years ago, a group of Republican lawmakers toured the death chamber in Oklahoma, which has been responsible for more executions per capita than any other state in the last half-century. They took in the jet-black gurney straps, the phone connected to the governor’s office and the microphone used for last words. “The hair rises on the back of your neck,” said state Rep. Kevin McDugle. “A few legislators couldn’t be in the room very long.” They continued on to death row to see Richard Glossip, who has spent more than 2 decades in solitary confinement, facing execution for a 1997 murder. Glossip says he had nothing to do with the crime, and a growing number of conservative lawmakers believe him. “I just remember putting my hand up on the glass,” McDugle recalled, “and he put his hand up, and I said, ‘You've got people fighting for you. Keep your head up, brother.’” As Oklahoma officials seek ...

It has now been ten years since Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill ending the death penalty in Illinois.  The abolition bill, signed on March 9, 2011, was the culmination of eleven years of debate after Governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions in 2000 and then issued four pardons and 167 commutations, clearing the state’s death row in 2003. The Illinois moratorium, imposed following a year in which U.S. executions peaked at 98, was a catalyst for rethinking the death penalty across the country.  At that time, 38 states authorized capital punishment. One year after Ryan’s mass commutation, the New York Court of Appeals declared its death-penalty statute unconstitutional.  The court subsequently applied that decision to the rest of the prisoners on the state’s death row in 2007.  The New York legislature then opted not to correct the constitutional error, effectively abolishing the state’s death penalty. Legislatures in New Jersey (2007) and New M...

It’s been 20 years since Illinois Gov. George Ryan captured national headlines and angered some in his own party by suspending the death penalty in Illinois.  He would go on to essentially “clear” death row by commuting sentences to life in prison. It happened after a troubling trend that saw as many inmates “exonerated” as “executed” in Illinois. WGN’s Ben Bradley spoke with the former governor who is out with a new book about his evolution on capital punishment.  “Most people didn’t care about the death penalty or what it did or how it worked, including me,” Ryan said. Ryan’s thinking changed when he became the guy throwing the proverbial switch, or in Illinois’ case, authorizing a lethal injection. “I was sitting in the mansion with my wife one day, one night, after a heavy day in the governor’s office, I was watching WGN News on TV, which you could get in Springfield, and here comes this little guy out of prison with a big grin on his face so happy to be out of jail,” he...

When given the chance in court, Jorge Torrez never said he was sorry. He didn’t speak at his sentencing for the rape and murders of two young girls in Zion. And earlier, when sentenced for murder in a case in Virginia, he told the judge, “There’s nothing I want to say, your honor.” But his attorney in the Zion case, Jed Stone, believes there remains a spark of humanity in him. Stone believes that the death penalty he faces — for the Virginia crime — is fundamentally unjust. The recent imposition of the federal death penalty means Torrez, who grew up in Zion, once again is in line to be executed, along with one other man convicted of murder in Illinois, Richard Mikos. Torrez was convicted in state court of the murder of the two girls in Zion but doesn’t face the death penalty in that case because Illinois law prohibits capital punishment. Instead, Torrez faces execution under federal law for the murder of a Navy petty officer in Virginia. Last year, the Trump ...

A 16-year pause in federal executions taught the president and the attorney general nothing. Late last week, Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government, after a hiatus of more than a decade and a half, will start executing prisoners again in December. In the 16 years since the last federal execution, those sitting on the federal death row, even those who had exhausted their appeals, remained imprisoned in the unit for the condemned. Still, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the federal government sought, and sometimes got, new death sentences—even in states where lawmakers have rejected capital punishment. Barr’s abrupt decision to resume federal executions looks like one more stunt to distract Americans from the misdeeds of his boss, President Donald Trump. But it’s also a statement about the persistence of the death penalty itself, despite everything wrong with it—its cost, its failure to deter crime, the long list of death-row inmates who...