Springfield, Ill. – The former governor of Illinois, George Ryan, dishonored by a corruption scandal that took him to prison still announced by some for clearing the state’s death corridor, has died. I was 91 years old.
Kankakee County Forensa, Robert Gessner, a family friend, said Ryan died Friday afternoon at his home in Kankakee, where he received hospice care.
Ryan began a pharmacist from a small town, but ended up directing one of the largest states in the country. Along the way, the hard republican in the crime experienced a conversion about the death penalty and won international praise by stopping executions as governor and, finally, emptying the death corridor.
It served only a term as a governor, from 1999 to 2003, which ended in accusations that used government offices to reward friends, win elections and hide the corruption that played a role in the wild deaths of six children. Finally, Ryan was sentenced for corruption charges and sentenced to 6 and a half years in a federal prison.
During his more than five years after bars, Ryan worked as a carpenter and became friends with the inmates, many of whom addressed him as “governor.” He was released in January 2013, weeks before his 79th birthday, with a thinner and more moderate aspect.
He had been challenging addressing prison. The night before entering, Ryan insisted that he was innocent and would prove it. But when Ryan asked President George W. Bush to grant him clemency in 2008, he said he accepted the verdict against him and felt “a deep shame.”
“I apologize to the people of Illinois for my behavior,” Ryan said at that time.
Ryan was still fulfilling his sentence when his wife, Lura Lynn, died in June 2011. He was briefly released to be on his deathbed, but he was not allowed to attend his funeral. The day he left the prison and returned to Kankakee’s house, where he and his wife had raised his children, one of his grandchildren gave him an urn who contained his wife’s ashes.
Born in Iowa and raised in Kankakee, Ryan married his high school girlfriend, followed his father to become a pharmacist and had six children. Those who met Ryan described him as the best man of the family and the neighbor of a neighbor, someone who let local children wear his basketball court or rushed Queen dairy to buy sweets when the ice cream truck was lost.
“He even offered to deliver the documents,” said newspapers distributor Ben Angelo when Ryan ran for governor. “He was serious.”
In 1968, Ryan was appointed to fill a term not defeated in the County Board, beginning a rapid increase in politics. Finally, he served as president of the Illinois Chamber, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State and, finally, governor.
An old school politician, Ryan emphasized pragmatism about ideology. He worked with officials from both parties and reached agreements in the golf course or during the afternoons of cigarettes and alcohol.
Ryan helped block the amendment for equal rights in the early 1980s during his term as president of the house of Illinois, which caused some of the most heated demonstrations ever seen in the Capitol.
“They wrote my blood name on the floor in front of the house, in front of the governor’s office,” Ryan said. “They were trying, agitated times, frankly.”
His willingness to put aside the orthodoxy of the party sometimes disagrees with more conservative Republicans.
He led a failed effort in 1989 to ensure that the General Assembly restrict assault weapons. He supported the expansion of the game. He became the first governor to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro took power. And in 2000, after signing the execution of a murderer, he decided not to carry out more. He imposed a moratorium on executions and began reviewing reforms to a judicial system that repeatedly sentenced innocent men to die.
Ultimately, Ryan decided that no reform would provide the certainty he wanted. In practically his last act as governor, he emptied the death corridor with pardons and switches in 2003.
“Because Illinois’s death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral, I’m not going to play with the machinery of death,” Ryan said.
Ryan was mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize while federal prosecutors were approaching. Before the end of the year, he would be accused of taking payments, gifts and vacations in exchange for contracts and leases of the management government, as well as lying to investigators and deceiving their taxes.
Much of the illegal activity took place during the two terms of Ryan as Secretary of State of Illinois, including the deaths of six children in 1994. They burned until death after their minivan hit a part that had fallen from a truck whose driver obtained his illegally license from the Ryan office.
Federal investigators discovered that Ryan had converted the secretary of the Secretary of State into an arm of his political campaign, pressing employees for contributions, some of which arose bribes of the drivers of unqualified trucks for licenses. After the death of the children, Ryan also destroyed the part of his office responsible for uprooting corruption.
Then, as governor, he directed millions of dollars in state leases and contracts to political experts who in turn provided gifts such as trips to a Jamaican resort and loans of $ 145,000 to their brother’s business, the researchers found. He was convicted of all charges on April 17, 2006.
The father of the six dead children criticized Ryan’s attitude at that time.
“There was no remorse in George Ryan after the verdict. That did not surprise me. That is Ryan’s same attitude, a chip on the shoulder,” said Reverend Scott Willis. “It makes it a little easier to feel euphoria. His attitude confirms that the verdict was correct.”
The anger towards Ryan weakened the Republicans for years and energized the governor campaign of a young charismatic democrat who promised to clean Springfield: Rod Blagojevich. Later, when federal researchers tested their own behavior, Blagojevich would ask that Ryan be granted clemency and released from prison.
