Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan died Friday morning at 91, more than two decades after leaving office for the last time and 12 years after his release from federal prison.
He died just one day after being put into hospice care in his native Kankakee.
Ryan, a Republican, served one term as governor from 1999 to 2003, and spent the last decade or so of his life speaking about and ultimately writing a book on his 2000 decision to put a moratorium on Illinois’ death penalty and then commuting the sentences of 167 death row inmates in the state’s prison system to life sentences.
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“I can’t really believe that there’s ever gonna be a system devised where an innocent person couldn’t be executed,” Ryan told Capitol News Illinois in a 2020 interview. “You gotta have a perfect law if you’re gonna have ... death as a penalty. So I just figured the best way to do it was to do away with that opportunity.”
But Ryan’s time as governor — and his entire 35-year career in politics — was ultimately overshadowed by his time as secretary of state in the 1990s. During his two terms leading that office, Ryan oversaw a license-for-bribes scheme that led to the deaths of six children in a fiery vehicle explosion and 79 federal indictments, including his own.
Before that, Ryan served as lieutenant governor alongside Gov. Jim Thompson, whose law firm would later represent Ryan pro bono in his corruption case. He also spent two years as Illinois House speaker, capping a decade in the General Assembly.
A pharmacist by trade, Ryan began his political career in the late 1960s on the Kankakee County Board.
License-for-bribes conviction
The former governor spent nearly six years in prison and on home confinement after his 2006 conviction on corruption charges stemming from an investigation into a freak accident on a Milwaukee expressway in 1994.
The Willis family, who’d been driving from Chicago to a vacation in Wisconsin, were engulfed in flames when their minivan exploded after a taillight fell off a semitrailer truck and punctured the van’s fuel tank. The explosion killed the six Willis children, while the Rev. Duane Willis and his wife Janet were badly burned.
An investigation into the crash revealed that other motorists had tried to warn the semi driver about the dangling vehicle part, but he didn’t understand English, even though federal law requires truck drivers be proficient in English to get a commercial license.
After Wisconsin authorities passed along the information to the Secretary of State’s office, an internal investigation found the truck driver may have paid a bribe to get his license. But Ryan squashed the probe and fired the investigators.
The feds, however, picked up the investigation while Ryan was running for governor, finding a systematic operation in which bribes paid for commercial driver’s licenses were funneled into Ryan’s campaign fund.
Even as secretary of state employees were being indicted in what came to be known as Operation Safe Roads, Ryan claimed to know nothing about the scheme and was elected governor over Democratic then-U.S. Rep. Glenn Poshard in 1998.
But as the investigation reached a fever pitch and the cloud of suspicion over Ryan grew, he chose to not run for a second term as governor in 2002. That paved the way for Democrat Rod Blagojevich’s victory over Republican Jim Ryan, who suffered from sharing a surname and party with the then-governor.
Ryan was indicted in 2004, convicted in 2006 after a lengthy trial and went to prison in 2007 following a monthslong appeals process, making him the third Illinois governor to serve time. Several years later, Blagojevich would follow.
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Death penalty moratorium
Since his 2013 release from prison and subsequent stint on home confinement, Ryan dedicated the last years of his life returning to a subject he’d become passionate about as governor: the death penalty.
Ryan parlayed his speaking engagements into a book, co-authored with a former Chicago Tribune reporter and published in 2020. The book, titled “Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois,” detailed the former governor’s debates and deliberations leading up to his decision to put a moratorium on the state’s death penalty in January 2000.
Just before leaving office three years later, Ryan commuted the death sentences of 167 Illinois prisoners, which garnered international attention.
Ryan’s ascent to the governor’s office coincided with emerging DNA evidence technology and a wave of exonerations across the country, including in Illinois. The state would later become known as an outlier for false confessions and exonerations. But at the time, Ryan’s stance was controversial in a tough-on-crime era of politics.
In his 2020 interview with CNI, Ryan said the majority of his staff tried to dissuade him from making moves on the death penalty, which wouldn’t be officially abolished in Illinois until 2011.
But Ryan said the uncertainty of decisions made under the death penalty system bothered him, especially in the wake of the exoneration of death row inmate Anthony Porter in February 1999, when Ryan was a month into his term as governor. Porter was freed after journalism students at Northwestern University uncovered evidence of his innocence.
“The whole system was just prone with error,” Ryan said. “It’s just — you got error in every corner.”
Former Illinois House GOP Leader Jim Durkin, who in 2023 stepped down from the post Ryan held decades before, told CNI he’d gotten to know the former governor better in his later years through Ryan’s son Homer.
Durkin said when he’d meet up with the Ryans in Kankakee while campaigning for fellow House Republicans, their lunches would often be punctuated by locals who'd wanted to say, “‘Hello, governor’ — not ‘Hello, George’ ... They loved him.”
“He made a mistake and he did his time,” Durkin said. “And he didn’t express or show any bitterness toward anyone involved in his case. Just wanted to get on with his life. That shows a strong man who takes responsibility.”
Illinois Senate Minority Leader John Curran, R-Downers Grove, echoed Durkin’s accolades that Ryan was a “master of bridging the gap” both between Republicans and Democrats and between organized labor and management.
“He was a bold leader who wasn’t afraid to reach across the aisle and bring people together for the greater good,” Curran said. “His investments in infrastructure, technology, and education to help create a brighter future for Illinois will long be remembered.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
