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Illinois Issues
Archive2001-Present: Scroll Down or Use Search1975-2001: Click Here

State of the State: The governor ignited a fire by musing aloud about his clemency powers

Aaron Chambers
WUIS/Illinois Issues

Edward Spreitzer doesn’t contest the guilty verdict against him. Nor does he dispute the horrid nature of the murder that landed him on Death Row. He simply argues the justice system that tried and convicted him is broken, just as Gov. George Ryan says it is, and that, therefore, his death sentence should not stand.

This is a bold legal argument, to say the least. But the courts won’t be deciding this case: The governor will. And if any argument should persuade Ryan to grant relief to Spreitzer, this evidently is the one.

Ryan has repeatedly called this state’s death penalty system “flawed” and “broken” since he declared a moratorium on executions almost three years ago. He said then that he feared an innocent person could be executed. In March, he went further, suggesting that he might commute to life in prison the sentences of every condemned inmate.

He ignited a fire. Last month, the Prisoner Review Board held hearings on whether to commute most death sentences in Illinois after lawyers representing those inmates rushed the board with petitions for clemency.

The vast majority of the petitioners weren’t claiming actual innocence, though. Instead, their clemency requests rested on the governor’s contention that the system is broken.

The board, which dedicated a room in its Springfield office for the stacks of paperwork associated with the hearings, heard the cases of most of the 159 men and women awaiting execution in Illinois. Its recommendations to the governor on whether to commute are confidential. 

Separately, Ryan’s office says he’s considering the cases of 16 prisoners who refused to sign petitions. Under state law, the board could not hear these cases. He also is eyeing commutations for at least 6 people convicted of murder who expect to be sentenced to death.

“I may commute all the sentences. It’s an option that I’ve got,” he said in an interview with Illinois Issues shortly before the hearings. “You’ve got to remember that all the people sentenced to Death Row were put there based on a system that’s flawed, broken. That’s my reason behind the possible mass commutation.”

He added: “I think the public should understand these people aren’t going to be released from jail. They’re going to be put into jail for the rest of their life and they’ll never get out.”

Ryan insists that clearing Death Row by commuting every death sentence is just one option he’s weighing. He also is pushing the General Assembly, during the veto session that begins this month, to enact recommendations made by a commission he formed to study the capital punishment process.

But by alluding, time and again, to the possibility of this extraordinary remedy, Ryan has led many to believe that granting a blanket commutation before he leaves office in January will be the grand finale of his reform efforts. He’s not expected, however, to act until after the veto session.

The prospect has energized criminal defense attorneys. They could continue appealing their clients’ murder convictions even if Ryan commutes the sentences, but they obviously would have a major hurdle behind them.

Last month, the Prisoner Review Board held hearings on whether to commute most death sentences in Illinois after lawyers representing those inmates rushed the board with petitions for clemency.

Prosecutors are enraged. They argue Ryan would be making a mockery of the criminal justice system where judges, prosecutors and defense counsel work tirelessly to ensure justice. 

“The ‘system is broken’ mantra apparently is a handy mechanism to avoid doing your work,” says Cook County State’s Attorney Dick Devine. His office fought 91 clemency requests. “The criminal justice system is made up of cases; we’re not producing widgets. You must look at each case.”

While prosecutors wait for Ryan’s decision, some are even mulling challenges to any commutations. 

Yet the governor’s clemency powers are broad and there doesn’t appear to be any way most commutations could be reversed. It’s not clear, however, whether the governor can commute death sentences before they’ve even been imposed.

The Illinois Constitution says he “may grant reprieves, commutations and pardons, after conviction, for all offenses on such terms as he thinks proper.” The provision continues: “The manner of applying therefore may be regulated by law.” A corresponding statute dictates that application procedure. Basically, the law requires petitions to be addressed to the governor, signed by the petitioner and filed with the Prisoner Review Board. It refers to the Constitution by concluding that “nothing in this section shall be construed to limit” the governor’s clemency power.

Spreitzer’s case is an especially dramatic illustration of the tensions inherent in a potential mass commutation. There are two reasons: the extreme nature of his crime and his association with Andrew Kokoraleis, the last person to be executed in Illinois. The two belonged to a gang linked to the rape, torture and murder of at least 16 Chicago-area women in the early 1980s. Both were sentenced to death in DuPage County, where several of the murders took place.

But while Ryan approved the execution of Kokoraleis — the only execution during his four-year term — he could spare Spreitzer’s life. John Kinsella, DuPage County’s first assistant state’s attorney, says this shows “the world of the death penalty in Illinois is a world of absurdity.”

“They are among the most brutal and heinous crimes ever committed,” Kinsella says. “For [Ryan] to turn around and say that Eddie Spreitzer deserves some sort of relief, and Kokoraleis didn’t, doesn’t make sense.”

Nevertheless, Spreitzer’s attorney claims his client’s death sentence, imposed in 1986, should be vacated because Spreitzer did not benefit from the gubernatorial commission’s recommendations made last spring or changes the Illinois Supreme Court made last year to rules governing the administration of the death penalty.

The court amended its rules in five areas. One change requires that most attorneys handling capital cases meet certain experience standards. The governor’s commission made 85 recommendations, including a reduction in the factors that, together with murder, qualify someone for death. None of these proposed reforms have been approved by the legislature or signed into law. 

“It would be unjust, in the face of the record of capital punishment in Illinois and the widespread reforms that the Ryan commission views as necessary to the creation of a just and reliable system, to allow the execution of any death sentence that was imposed under the prior, flawed regime,” the attorney, Gary Prichard, wrote in Spreitzer’s clemency petition. This record includes 13 men exonerated from Death Row since this state reinstated the death penalty in 1977 — one more than the number of people executed.

Prichard juxtaposed the facts of Spreitzer’s case with several of these measures. For example, he wrote, the jury at Spreitzer’s trial was not told that the only alternative to a sentence of death was life imprisonment. The commission would require that juries in all capital cases be so instructed.

Prichard also wrote that Spreitzer was represented at trial by one assistant public defender. The high court’s new rules require that two defense attorneys represent an indigent defendant in a capital case.

And Prichard suggested that Spreitzer isn’t culpable because his IQ of 76 is “barely above the level that would qualify him as being mentally retarded.” 

Notably, he didn’t suggest that his client is innocent. Nor did attorneys representing the vast majority of the clemency petitioners.

In fact, most of the petitions filed with the Prisoner Review Board mirrored a model petition circulated by Locke Bowman, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School.

The generic draft, which was available in electronic form, included spaces for attorneys to insert the facts of a specific case. It also included a basic argument for the commutation of a death sentence based upon the “unfairness of a death sentence” imposed without the benefit of the commission’s recommended reforms, the high court’s new rules or certain legislative enactments.

At one point in the model petition, Bowman urged attorneys to quote language from the gubernatorial commission’s report. “It might also be good to get a newspaper quote from the governor on how the system is broken and fundamentally flawed,” he wrote.

For their part, prosecutors uniformly argue that while the prisoners’ claims may appear compelling, a case-by-case review shows they do not withstand substantial scrutiny. They pushed to individualize those cases. 

In their response to Spreitzer’s petition, for instance, DuPage County prosecutors attached color photographs of victims linked to the gang’s murder spree. One shows the body of a woman found bound and naked in an alley. Another is of a woman lying facedown in a field, her body mangled.

 


Aaron Chambers can be reached at statehousebureau@aol.com

 

Illinois Issues, November 2002

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