Ultimate Punishment Read Free Page B

was elected, although, like many other nominal Democrats, I had supported him as the better choice on the issues when he ran for Governor. Not long after Ryan’s election, I spent two days at a state literary event where the Governor-elect’s wife, Lura Lynn, was representing her husband, who as Secretary of State was also Illinois’ official Librarian. Mrs. Ryan is a charmer—good-humored, straightforward, and bright. She spoke candidly about political life, and one of the things she told me was that her husband, who would be sixty-eight at the end of his term, had promised her he would not run for reelection. Mrs. Ryan was far too experienced in politics to take that at face value and said as much. But in the years that ensued, as others castigated George Ryan and looked askance at his motives, I remembered what Mrs. Ryan had said. To me, George Ryan always appeared to be somebody who knew the rehearsal was over. In the time he had, on the issues that counted, he was simply going to do what was right.

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AMERICA AND THE DEATH PENALTY
    W HATEVER George Ryan’s character or motives, there can be no dispute that Ryan’s decision to declare the moratorium was the first act in a national reassessment of the death penalty that is quite clearly under way. In May 2002, Parris Glendenning, the Governor of Maryland, followed Ryan’s example and suspended executions in his state for a year, pending a study of racial disparities in who gets sentenced to death. (The report by Raymond Paternoster of the University of Maryland was released on January 7, 2003, and concluded that both race and geography affect death penalty decisions in Maryland, but the new Governor, Robert Ehrlich, has vowed to lift the moratorium, a position that probably gained appeal in the wake of the Beltway Sniper killings.) The state of Indiana established a Criminal Law Study Commission in 2001 to look at various issues related to the death penalty. In March of 2003, a committee appointed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recommended halting all executions in the state until the reasons for apparent racial bias in the application of the death penalty in the state are better understood.
    The American judiciary also seems to be exhibiting a new willingness to restrict the death penalty, led by the U.S. Supreme Court. In June 2002, the Court ruled that a defendant who has elected a jury trial has a constitutional right to have that jury, rather than a judge, decide if he will be sentenced to death. The ruling brought into question death sentences imposed in nine different states. Furthermore, based on that holding, in September a federal judge in Vermont said the federal capital punishment statute is unconstitutional because it lacks adequate safeguards on the evidence presented to juries to obtain a death verdict.
    Even more significantly, perhaps, the Supreme Court also ruled in 2002 that execution of the mentally retarded is unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment. The decision invites extended litigation about how capable a human being must be before execution is constitutionally acceptable. At the start of the Supreme Court’s next term, in October 2002, four justices expressed the view that executing murderers who were under eighteen at the time of their crime is also cruel and unusual punishment. Their consensus essentially guarantees that the entire Court will eventually decide this question (which may well determine the fate of Lee Malvo, who is facing a capital trial in Virginia for the Beltway Sniper shootings he allegedly committed at age seventeen).
    The Supreme Court’s new latitude toward death penalty issues continued in its next term. In 2003, the Court nudged the door wider for post-conviction review in federal court for capital cases and raised the bar for a defense lawyer’s duty to seek out mitigating evidence for a capital sentencing hearing.
    This, of course, is not the first time that America and