Illinois governor saves 156 from death row

The Governor of Illinois yesterday emptied the state's death row by commuting the sentences of 156 inmates, in an unprecedented move amid growing concern about the fairness of executions.

Governor George Ryan, whose term comes to an end tomorrow, hastily dispatched letters to the prisoners' families, explaining that he was commuting death sentences to life imprisonment.

"I thought about it night and day," Mr Ryan told the Chicago Sun-Times. "I finally came to the conclusion that this was the right decision and I'm going to have to live with it."

He told the families that he found the decision difficult but had decided it was the only way that he could prevent innocent people being put to death by lethal injection.

Mr Ryan's spokesman said: "He's been talking about this for a few days, and in only a handful of cases was he considering, for a variety of reasons, not to include [them] in the commutations. Ultimately ... he came to the decision this was the only thing to do."

The decision follows the pardoning on Friday of four long-time death row inmates, whom Mr Ryan concluded had been tortured by police to provide confessions. The pardons and commutations mark the end of a three-year examination of the death penalty which started when Mr Ryan announced a moratorium on executions in January 2000.

In a speech on Friday, Mr Ryan condemned the state's criminal justice system for sending innocent men to prison or to be executed. "The system has failed all four men," he said. "It has failed the people of this state."

The public soul-searching in Illinois comes as new figures reveal the total number of inmates on death row in the US has dropped for the first time in a generation. In addition, the number of prisoners sentenced to death in 2001 – the most recent year for which information is available – was 155, the lowest since 1973. The average for previous years had been twice that.

While the drop is the result of several factors, including a lower murder rate, experts said it also reflected growing public discomfort with the administration of the death penalty and the exoneration – through use of DNA evidence – of many people who would otherwise have been executed.

In Illinois, more people had been exonerated in recent years than executed.

Austin Sarat, professor of political science at Amherst College, told The New York Times: "We're in a period of national reconsideration. People are asking whether the death penalty is compatible with values which in the American mainstream are taken seriously: equal protection, due process, protection of the innocent. What was played out in Illinois will be played out across the nation."

Surveys show that an overwhelming but declining majority of Americans – perhaps as many as 70 per cent – still support the death penalty, if applied fairly.

A study released last week in Maryland found that the killers of white people were much more likely to be put to death than those whose victims were black.