New battle looms over capital punishment as Governor clears Death Row

Supporters and opponents of the death penalty in the US were mobilising yesterday for their greatest confrontation in three decades after George Ryan, the outgoing Governor of Illinois, cleared the state's Death Row of its 167 inmates.

The announcement by Mr Ryan, who leaves office today, is the biggest frontal challenge to the death penalty since the Supreme Court struck down every state law on the subject in 1972. All 156 prisoners awaiting execution in Illinois, plus 11 others sentenced to death pending hearings, will have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment without parole.

As the minority opposing capital punishment has slowly grown, the Supreme Court has nibbled at the problem, outlawing the execution of mentally retarded convicts and addressing the issue of people who were minors when they committed their crimes. But it has not ruled on the basic constitutionality of capital punishment, and a majority of justices have either supported it, or held that it was a matter for individual states to decide. Now, one state governor has taken matters into his own hands, on the basis of the most comprehensive state study of capital punishment in 30 years – which showed that while Illinois had executed 12 people since capital punishment returned to America in 1976, 13 Death Row convicts had been exonerated. Quoting the words of the late Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun – who like Mr Ryan was a supporter of capital punishment earlier in his career – the Governor declared: "I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

He identified two main problems: the possibility that an innocent prisoner would die, and the impossibility of justly deciding which convicts should die. He spoke of the "demon of error" that haunted the system: "error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die".

Technically, the effect of his announcement – the largest such blanket clemency in US history – will not extend beyond Illinois, which is but one of the 38 states (out of 50) which have capital punishment on their statute books.

But the commutations, as even death penalty proponents admit, are irreversible, and until Saturday Illinois had the eighth largest Death Row in the country, which implies that the total US Death Row population – 3,697 at the end of 2002 – will decline significantly for the first time in 25 years.

"This means that you have to start all over again with the death penalty," said Richard Dieter, the director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, a leading advocate of abolition. "How many times do we have to go through a revolution like this before we conclude humans cannot make these judgments?"

Supporters of the death penalty were furious. Richard Devine, the state attorney for Illinois' Cook County (which covers Chicago) accused the Governor of "tremendously undermining the system of criminal justice". Many victims' groups were outraged as well. Critics claim Mr Ryan has acted cynically to deflect attention from his alleged role in a corruption and ethics scandal.

In Washington, Bill Frist, the newly appointed Republican Senate majority leader, said he opposed a general moratorium on capital punishment.