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Exonerated death row inmate Albert Ronnie Burrell (L) walks with death penalty opponent Roberto Ramerez as they carry a letter to Illinois Governor George Ryan asking that he commute the sentences of all Illinois death row inmates to life without parole, in Chicago, December 2002. Burrell and other exonerated prisoners relayed the letter over a 37 mile route from Stateville prison (where Illinois carries out its executions) to the governor's office in Chicago. Burrell, who served 13 years on death row was 17 days away from execution when his ex-wife recanted her testimony REUTERS/Scott Olson

Hours after his unprecedented announcement of the pardon package Ryan’s office would announce another earth shattering event, the full commutation of every man on death row in the prairie state. By the end of the week one hundred and sixty seven people would no longer be on death row. Elected as a conservative Republican who never gave a momentÇs thought to the rightness or morality of the death penalty, Ryan would be the last politician one would expect would strike down the nation’s seventh largest death row with a harsh voice, his nervousness evident by his fidgety presentation the one term governor struck a mighty blow against the death system in America.

Exercising a breadth of vision that is truly remarkable in an American sitting—albeit departing—politician, Ryan spoke of the problems facing not just those condemned to death but in the processes, prosecutions, and judgments effecting those condemned to life. His words were a rare gubernatorial recognition of the deficits in the system entire.

He said the system has proven itself to be wildly inaccurate, unjust, unable to separate the innocent from the guilty, and racist.

His commutations of over one hundred and sixty death sentences unquestionably stays the cold hand of death. But it does not address the injustices that led many to death row, nor keeps them confined on life row. For those problems those deep cracks in the system remain.

It is tragically true that as Ryan charges, “the system is broken.” The bitter truth is his efforts, while undeniably noble and unquestionably historic, do not fix the mess. To his credit Ryan assembled a blue ribbon panel to examine the states death system and the commission after three years came to a political yet systematic conclusion: the system is broken. The commission composed of prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, and scholars joined in the report and issued some 85 recommendations to fix the system, including the recording of confessions from beginning to end, the end of jailhouse snitching confessions, which are notoriously unreliable yet influential to unknowing jurors, and a host of other recommendations.

The legislature opted to ignore those recommendations just as the states highest judiciary chose to ignore many of the most blatant injustices. And Ryan the non-lawyer felt compelled to act. If the system is broken, how can the system fix the system? Ryan’s very extraordinary acts seems to suggest that it can not. For while those four men are free of unjust convictions, are they the only four innocents on the state’s large death row, or larger life row? That seems unlikely.

In another sense as the underlying system remains tightly imbedded in place, what of those to come? How many years will other innocents suffer in the suffocating holds of steel and brick slave ships-prisons before another scandal threatens the stability of the system? Like the notorious cycle of police corruption cases that plagues US cities like New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and—yes—Chicago, the problem isn’t fixed but passed on to later administrations. It seems an abolitionist movement must take this, not as a final victory, but as a first step of a systematic battle for real change. We may all agree that the system is broken, but that mere agreement does not insure that that which is broken will indeed be fixed.

From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

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—These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.