He didn’t free Mumia. He didn’t even free Winona. Nonetheless, former Governor of Illinois George Ryan has done an extraordinarily difficult thing. What he has done is virtually unheard of in the political world, and not much more frequent in the ordinary world. He has informed himself about an issue.

The issue is the death penalty in Illinois, and after a long period of studies, he has concluded that it is simply unusable at this point in his state. Following the vindication of several people on death row by DNA evidence, Ryan had ordered a moratorium on executions. Last week, he took the next step on his final day in office, commuting the sentences of 149 individuals on death row to life without the possibility of parole, giving a full pardon to four others who were tortured into giving confessions, and commuting three other sentences down to life with a possibility that they could be paroled.

Critics will probably ask, why the thief-in-the-night strategy of waiting until the last day he is in office? Is this another Marc Rich pardon?

The answer is moderately political. Pardons on the last few days are typical, because that way, Ryan can disappear. No matter what he does in the last few days in his office, he is safe from impeachment based on partisan concerns and will get only a moderate reproach from the public. For that matter, it’s likely that everyone in Illinois, Republican and Democrat, would have begged for his impeachment, no matter how few days he had left in his term.

Will anyone really understand this? It’s unlikely. The problems that Ryan saw — police torture, wrongly convicted people, jury misconduct — aren’t going to go away. They’re problems that are probably happening on a daily basis somewhere in every state.

That’s why this is a big deal. Ryan is not actually making a statement about Illinois and its death penalty. Those are just the beginning. Every state that still uses capital punishment has seen these things in varying degrees. Almost certainly Illinois isn’t the worst. The probability of Texas having put innocent people to death is around 100 percent. Even in a state that large, the obviously guilty are hard to come by.

This is a problem not just with capital cases either. The unreliability of eyewitness statements has been illustrated by people like Iowa State’s psychology professor Gary Wells. Even worse, jury misconduct is a near certainty. There’s still 12 angry men and women determining the sentences of criminals, but there aren’t a whole lot of Henry Fondas in the bunch. People who would serve as good leaders for juries or just plain good jurors are likely to be occupied elsewhere and find a way out of what is regarded as tedious, thankless work. Juries end up being whatever 12 unemployed and unoccupied people happen to get dragged off the street.

People being innocent until proven guilty is a popular myth, but the presence of a jury precludes that. If you were in a jury trying somebody with a swastika tattooed on their forehead, you’re likely to vote guilty. If you’re trying O.J. Simpson, you’re going to vote not guilty. It’s the same kind of superficiality that motivates our daily lives, illustrated in dramatic fashion.

George Ryan should be applauded, and not merely because I think the death penalty is unnecessary and wasteful. George Ryan should be applauded because he looked at the facts he had, and decided to do something even though it is almost guaranteed to be unpopular, at least among anyone that a politician would care about. Ryan did something guaranteed to win him next to no votes, since felons can’t vote, and most of their families are in socio-economic classes that participate in the electoral process about as often as Halley’s Comet pays them a visit. He also decided to do something to make a statement about the world of problems that are America’s criminal courts system.

It’s beautiful what the end of a term can be used to do. This is no Marc Rich pardon, this isn’t even a pardon of George Steinbrenner (Reagan, 1989), Armand Hammer (Bush, 1989), or Patty Hearst (numerous times by different presidents). There’s no political gain or even monetary gain from this. All Ryan gets is a cleaner conscience and a hope for a better future.

Ryan is a thief in the night, breaking into the Illinois State House to polish the silver, vacuum the rug and clean the bloodstains out of the walls. It’s just a shame that it took voting him out of office to do it. If this is what happens at the end of a governor’s term, maybe the terms should be about fifteen minutes long.

All we know is that the system is flawed on numerous levels. At least George Ryan was willing to admit that, even before the police beat it out of him.

Tim Kearns

is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.