CHICAGO (AP) — A federal appeals court upheld former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s racketeering and fraud conviction yesterday, but he will be allowed to remain free on bond while his attorneys make a fresh appeal.
The 73-year-old former governor, once the state’s most powerful Republican, had been under a court order to report to prison within 72 hours of the failure of his appeal.
But the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals relented and allowed him to remain free while his attorneys press their case for a rehearing before all 11 actively serving appeals judges.
Earlier yesterday, a panel of the appeals court brushed aside claims by defense attorneys that jury deliberations at Ryan’s trial had been fatally flawed and that the guilty verdict should be overturned.
His attorneys were filing for a rarely granted “en banc” hearing that would have the entire appeals court hear the appeal, said longtime Ryan supporter James R. Thompson, another former Illinois governor whose law firm, Winston & Strawn, represented Ryan free of charge.
“Governor Ryan obviously is disappointed,” Mr. Thompson said. But he said, “No court ever deprived a defendant of his life and liberty under these circumstances and that is an argument we will make if necessary to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Ryan was convicted last year of racketeering conspiracy, fraud and other offenses for taking payoffs from political insiders in exchange for state business while he was Illinois secretary of state from 1991 to 1999 and governor for four years after that. Prosecutors said he steered state contracts and leases to insiders and used tax dollars in his political campaigns.
In his appeal, Ryan’s attorneys argued that the jury’s deliberations were flawed. U.S. District Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer replaced two jurors with alternates after deliberations in the case started, and the defense said unauthorized documents brought into the jury room poisoned the deliberations.
The three-judge 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel disagreed in yesterday’s 2-1 decision.
“The fact that the trial may not have been picture perfect is, in itself, nothing unusual,” Judge Diane Wood wrote in the majority opinion, joined by Judge Daniel Manion.
Judge Michael Kanne dissented and said Ryan and his co-defendant, businessman-lobbyist Larry Warner, should get a new trial. Judge Kanne said the concession that the trial wasn’t picture perfect was “a whopping understatement by any measure” and called the jury deliberations “dysfunctional.”
Ryan and Warner both maintain they did nothing illegal.
The investigation into the men began as a probe of bribes exchanged for commercial driver’s licenses in Illinois. It ballooned into a wide-ranging investigation of corruption when Ryan was a major political power at the Statehouse in Springfield and led to dozens of convictions of state officials, lobbyists, driving instructors and others.
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