Thursday, October 16, 2003
Pennsylvania's Gov. Rendell is against a death-penalty moratorium.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan joined about 1,000 people at a rally at the Pennsylvania Capitol who urged Gov. Ed Rendell and the state Legislature to back a moratorium on executions.
Ryan, who attracted national attention by emptying that Illinois' death row on his way out of office, said Pennsylvania is in a similar position as his state was three years ago.
"The red flags are up all over this state," he said at the Saturday rally. "You've exonerated more than you've executed. Why would you do that?"
Rendell opposes a death-penalty moratorium. Since taking office in January, he has signed 10 death warrants.
"One in seven individuals sentenced to death have been exonerated. The death penalty has to go," said former death-row inmate Jay Smith, whose 1986 conviction of the murders of Upper Merion High School teacher Susan Reinert and her two children was overturned in 1992.
Ex-governor's comments
Ryan, as Illinois governor, imposed a moratorium on executions in 2000 after 13 death-row prisoners who were found to have been wrongfully convicted were released.
"There is no politics when you call for a moratorium. A moratorium will give you a chance to look at and to stop the machinery of death," Ryan said.
During his final days in office in January, Ryan pardoned four death-row inmates and commuted the sentences of all 167 of the state's condemned prisoners, most of them to life in prison without parole.
Sylvester Schieber, whose daughter Shannon was murdered in her Philadelphia apartment five years ago by a serial rapist, said his and his wife's opposition to the death penalty never wavered, even amid personal tragedy.
"We need to start staring our political leaders in the face and find out why they are trying to kill these people," Schieber said from a podium on the steps in front of the state Capitol.
Penn State student Richard Byamugisha, who is black, compared the death penalty to the lynchings once common in the South, only "now we can do it officially" in Pennsylvania.