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By David McKinney
Stateline.org
Leonard Kidd is on Illinois' Death Row for setting a 1980 apartment fire that killed 10 children as well as a 1984 stabbing spree that killed four others. No one in state history - other than previously executed serial killer John Wayne Gacy - has been held responsible for more murders.
Kenneth Allen also is awaiting execution. He was convicted and sentenced to death for fatally shooting two Chicago cops in 1979. One of those police officers was killed by Allen with two bullets to the forehead while wounded and crawling for cover on a city street.
On Tuesday morning, Allen and Kidd shared the distinction of being among the first of Illinois' nearly 160 condemned killers to go before a state clemency panel to argue for mercy. Throughout the week, they and their fellow inmates will portray themselves as victims of a capital punishment system that Republican Gov. George Ryan has said is "broken."
Illinoisans hold a dim view of the retiring governor for presiding over a scandal while secretary of state when commercial drivers licenses were illegally exchanged for bribes bound for his campaign fund. Ryan has not been charged but is believed to be a target in a four-year-old federal corruption probe that has effectively ended his long political career. Several key aides and his political fund have been indicted.
Yet, outside the state, there is talk of a possible Nobel Prize for Ryan someday, particularly if he follows through on the stunning possibility of reducing everyone's sentence on Death Row to life in prison without parole. That is something no Illinois governor nor any chief executive anywhere in the country has done on this scale.
"The whole nation is watching Illinois,'' said David Elliott, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based National Coalition Against the Death Penalty. "We're looking at potentially the most comprehensive commutation since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976."
The state's prosecutors and scores of family members whose loved ones were murdered are aghast at what may be unfolding in Illinois. But Ryan said such a blanket order may be the only just way to address problems that have led to the exonorations of 13 Death Row inmates, one more than the number of prisoners executed since Illinois re-imposed the death penalty in 1977. The governor halted executions nearly three years ago.
"There may still be innocent men on death row, sentenced to die by a badly flawed system,'' Ryan said. "If that system is allowed to continue unchanged and unreformed, then there undoubtedly will be more innocent men and women who find themselves awaiting their death at the hands of the people of the state of Illinois for a crime they did not commit."
Sam Evans, whose pregnant daughter and two grandchildren died in a macrabe murder scheme aimed at stealing the woman's unborn child, believes his family's killers on Death Row - Jacqueline Williams and Fedell Caffey - were treated fairly by the justice system. The real unfairness, Evans said, will occur if Ryan spares them from execution.
"Why do we have the jury system? Why do we have the system we have if you're going to look at a man who happens to be governor, and he can, with a twist of pen, change the whole thing? I totally disagree with that," Evans said.
As Ryan mulls over what to do, he has not been shy about injecting his beliefs on the death penalty's misuse into this fall's campaigns. The Republican trying to succeed him, Attorney General Jim Ryan, has been the butt of the governor's criticism, which flared earlier this month.
"I'm glad I'm not the Ryan who put people on death row and left them there," the governor said in reference to the Rolando Cruz case that Jim Ryan handled as DuPage County state's attorney.
Cruz was repeatedly prosecuted by Jim Ryan for the kidnap, rape and murder of a 10-year-old
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