Today is the 70th anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Check out Fred Zinneman’s great film about it, “From Here to Eternity.” Look for George Reeves, TV’s “Superman,” as Burt Lancaster’s sergeant!
Also today, Illinois’s ousted governor Rod Blagojevich’s 14 year sentence for trying among other things to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat, obscures the real true crime story happening there with former governor George Ryan, the man Rod replaced. Before leaving office in 2005, former governor Ryan commuted the death sentence of every person on Illinois’s death row, 150 people.
“I’m going to sleep well tonight knowing that I made the right decision,” said Governor Ryan at the time. “Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious – and therefore immoral – I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” he said at the time. After leaving office, Ryan was convicted on Federal corruption and racketeering charges, e.g. steering state contracts to people who paid him off. He’s been in prison ever since, about five years,
Okay, I have a question. At what point does the good that someone does in their life mitigate the bad they do in that same life? My barometer is Pres. Andrew Johnson. In 1868, he commuted the life sentence of Dr. Samuel Mudd, for knowingly treating John Wilkes Booth, Pres. Lincoln’s cowardly assassin. The reason he commuted the sentence was that Mudd assisted “heroically” during a Yellow Fever epidemic that swept the prison he was in, the Dry Tortugas off Florida’s west coast.
Cut to the present. Rod joins George in Federal prison. But should George Ryan still be there? Maybe he didn’t help out in a yellow fever epidemic like Mudd, but he sure took a spirited and unpopular stand as a Republican in a state that uses the death penalty. That was total political suicide. Yet if George Ryan was right, he has saved at least one or more lives.
Ryan has now served double Mudd’s three years, for knowingly aiding the assassin of the President of the United States.
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” from Titletown Publishing, LLC; (August 26, 2011).