With latest rejection, Ryan's only hope is a presidential pardon

With the U.S. Supreme Court refusing Tuesday to hear former Gov. George Ryan's appeal, Ryan's attorney announced he will ask President Bush for clemency.

"In my opinion, the next appropriate step is to ask the president of the United States … for executive clemency," said James R. Thompson, Ryan's attorney and himself a former Illinois governor.

Thompson specifically will seek commutation of Ryan's sentence. Clemency can take the form of either a pardon, in which the conviction is removed, or commutation of a sentence, in which the punishment is lessened.

Thompson said the point of a criminal sentence is to punish wrongdoers and deter would-be criminals from going down a similar road. If that's the case, he said, both purposes have been served by the time Ryan has served already.

"To serve out his maximum sentence … would have him in the penitentiary until he was (almost) 80 years old," Thompson said. "His career is gone. His reputation is gone. His pension, for now, is gone."

With Bush on his way out of office, he would face little political repercussions for granting such a request, and Thompson has the political pull to at least get such a request seriously considered.

Thompson denied that he would reach out to his friend, former Bush adviser Karl Rove, to try to influence the process.

"This is not a political process. If I had a political problem, I might call Karl Rove. This is a legal problem," Thompson said.

As far as the possibility of a commutation request's success, former U.S. Attorney Patrick Collins acknowledged it was a distinct possibility. Collins was the prosecutor who garnered Ryan's conviction before moving on to private practice.

"We've seen that President Bush has issued a commutation (before) on a high-profile corruption case," said Collins, referring to the commutation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted of obstruction of justice in the investigation into the White House leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity.

"I would just urge … if presented with a petition, that President Bush seriously consider whether it's the right thing to do and whether it sends the right message to the public," Collins said.

A man who answered the phone at Ryan's home in Kankakee said the family had no comment for now.

The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, issued a brief statement on the Supreme Court development:

"We are gratified that the Supreme Court has let stand an important jury verdict that vindicated the citizens' right to the honest services of government officials in Illinois. Mr. Ryan has exhausted every legal avenue and argument afforded him, but the verdict stands that he was guilty of corrupting the highest office in the state."

Ryan had sought a review of his case because several jurors were dismissed during deliberations after failing to disclose criminal backgrounds in a pretrial questionnaire. Alternate jurors were then brought in, the deliberations restarted, and a conviction obtained. One of the jurors who was dismissed was a Ryan holdout.

"We thought that there were viable, strong constitutional issues," Thompson said.

"Effectively the Supreme Court said the jury's decision is vindicated," Collins said, noting that U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, the target of much criticism, had bent over backward to be fair to Ryan.

A call to Pallmeyer was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Collins said he hoped the case would serve as a deterrent to political corruption.

"The lesson of the Ryan case is the tangible effect of corruption," Collins said.

Ryan, 74, was convicted of racketeering and fraud. The jury decided he had accepted perks and favors for government contracts and favors.

Although Ryan had no direct involvement in it, workers in the Illinois secretary of state's office routinely accepted bribes when Ryan ran that office, testimony and an investigation revealed. The bribes were often funneled to Ryan's election fund, it was shown.

One such bribe allowed a trucker who did not speak English to secure a license. He subsequently could not understand fellow truckers' warnings via radio that something was dangling from his truck. The object fell and punctured the gas tank of a minivan, setting it on fire and killing six children.

Thompson noted that Bush has given fewer pardons and commutations than other modern presidents. He said he did not feel that Ryan's commutation of the death sentence for hundreds of Illinois prisoners would hurt his chances with Bush, who routinely denied requests for death penalty commutations when he was governor of Texas.

Executive clemency

There are three forms of executive clemency, according to the U.S. attorney's Web site:

Pardon: Removes the conviction from the person's record

Commutation: Shortens the sentence of the person convicted

Remission of fine: Cuts or removes a monetary fine

Source: U.S. Department of Justice; James Thompson news conference