Quinn grants 85 clemency petitions

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn continued Friday to chip away at the backlog of clemency petitions left behind by his predecessor, ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich, by granting 85 clemency petitions and denying 189 others.

Quinn granted pardons, expunged convictions or did both in the cases that included offenses from burglary and drug charges to armed robbery and reckless discharge of a firearm. People were sentenced for the offenses between 1961 and 2004, with a majority of them receiving probation. A handful of offenders were sentenced to more than one year in prison.

Quinn did not have a public schedule Friday and his office did not explain his clemency decisions when they were announced.

This latest action brings to 467 the number of clemency petitions Quinn has granted. He has denied 728 other petitions. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board studies clemency petitions and recommends to the governor whether to grant them.

Blagojevich left a backlog of more than 2,500 cases when he was impeached and removed from office in January 2009, after his arrest on federal corruption charges. Blagojevich is currently on trial in Chicago for a second time.

Executive clemency has been in the spotlight since former Republican Gov. George Ryan pardoned several people on death row and commuted the sentences of other condemned inmates before leaving office in 2003. Quinn recently signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in Illinois and commuted the sentences of all 15 men who remained on death row.

Rob Warden, director of the Northwestern University Law School Center on Wrongful Convictions, said he wants Quinn to deal with some of the high-profile clemency cases awaiting action, including five people he said were accused of murder but are innocent. Four were exonerated by the courts, and the fifth was released on parole, he said.

Warden called it "mind-boggling" that Quinn hasn't yet acted.

"It's really dismaying that he will not deal with those cases," Warden said.