Former Gov. Ryan Says Nelson Mandela Influenced The Clearing Of Illinois’ Death Row

(CBS) – Nelson Mandela influenced George Ryan’s controversial 2003 decision to clear Illinois’ Death Row a decade ago, the former governor said during a memorial service honoring the humanitarian Sunday.

Ryan, a free man since July after serving more than five years in prison for a federal corruption conviction, spoke during a memorial service for Mandela held at Beloved Community Christian Church of God in Christ in Chicago.

The Kankakee Republican recounted how Mandela called him 10 years ago in hopes of persuading him to spare the lives of the state’s condemned inmates. Ryan earlier had suspended executions after some Death Row inmates were exonerated, and he ultimately commuted the death sentences of 167 inmates to life in prison in January 2003.

“At that time, I hadn’t decided what my decision was going to be, but Nelson Mandela called me from South Africa and asked me to do what I did, and it had an impact on what my actions were,” Ryan said.

The two men, Ryan recalled, had met during the governor’s trade mission to both Cuba and South Africa in the year 2000. Ryan said he was honored to spend 30 minutes with Mandela in his homeland.

“President Mandela transcended the boundaries of South Africa and emerged as the world’s beloved Mandiba, or ‘the father,’ as he was known. He was a towering figure of courage and tenacity and forgiveness,” the former governor said.

During his warmly received speech, Ryan said nothing about his willingness to forgive the prosecutors or the witnesses against him in his corruption trial.

He left without taking reporters’ questions.

Earlier, Ryan said that at first Mandela had declined to meet with him on that trade mission. Ryan said he asked an intermediary to plead on his behalf, and the meeting came off after all.

That intermediary: Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Mandela, who died at the age of 95 earlier this month, was laid to rest in his own country Sunday.

Source: CBS Chicago, December 16, 2013

Israel tried to influence Mandela trial, declassified documents show

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

The Israeli Foreign Ministry tried to convince South Africa's apartheid regime not to seek the death penalty in Nelson Mandela's 1964 trial, newly released documents reveal.

According to the documents, which were declassified by the Israel State Archives on Sunday, Israel's stance resulted in a letter to the South African government urging it to negotiate with Mandela and the other defendants in the trial. The letter also criticized the regime's segregationist policies.

In 1964, after Mandela and other members of the African National Congress were indicted for sabotage and conspiracy, then-Foreign Minister Golda Meir urged Israel's charge d'affaires in Cape Town to express Israel's displeasure with the trial. Meir also praised Mandela's now-famous speech denouncing the trial, saying it was "a great performance that put on display immense courage and voiced the pain of millions of Africans."

As a result of Meir's effort, the Israeli Foreign Ministry convinced philosopher Martin Buber and Israeli author Haim Hazaz to send a letter to the government of South Africa to protest the regime's crackdown on the ANC.

"Talk to them. Listen to them. They have something to say. You will not silence their voices by hanging them. ... From the land of Israel, we ask you to assert your faith in the nobility of man, whatever the color of his skin. And if you 'do unto others' in accordance with this faith, the future is yours, and theirs -- and the world's," Buber and Hazaz wrote.

The head of the Israeli mission in Cape Town also sent a cable to Israel detailing the dire financial straits Mandela's wife, Winnie, was facing.

Source: Israel Hayom, December 9, 2013

Without the Observer, and David Astor, Mandela would have hanged

In 1964, when Nelson Mandela and others were facing the death penalty, one newspaper, the Observer, kept the issue before the world's eyes, and effectively saved the ANC leadership

Writing in the 20-page Mandela supplement inside today's paper, author Jeremy Lewis, who is currently working on a biography of former Observer editor David Astor, quotes from a letter by South African anti-apartheid campaigner Mary Benson to Astor in 1964: "I wonder whether you realise how much you and the Observer must be largely responsible for Nelson's life?"

The letter is a reference to the Observer's relentless reporting from South Africa in that period and in particular its coverage of the Rivonia trial in 1963-64, when Mandela and other ANC figures faced the death penalty for acts of sabotage against the regime. The Observer, through the redoubtable Anthony Sampson, covered the trial on a weekly basis and campaigned for the men to be spared the death penalty.

Shaun Johnson, chief executive of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in Cape Town, and a former editor of the leading South African liberal newspaper the Weekly Mail, is in no doubt about the significance of the Observer's coverage. He told us: "I've spoken to many of the Rivonia triallists, and I've spoken to Mr Mandela, and I believe that, if the Rivonia trial had taken place without the world's media covering it, it is possible the apartheid government would have hanged the triallists. The Observer led the way, unquestionably, by a country mile. The fact that the Observer relentlessly, every Sunday, was publishing front-page reports on this, I have no doubt influenced wiser people within the cabinet at that time to say, 'Wow, this could be really bad international publicity'."

Johnson was speaking to the Observer two years ago when we travelled to South Africa to make a short film on the paper's role in campaigning against the anti-apartheid regime. What we found was a remarkable fondness for David, and an acute appreciation of the paper's role in the fight.

While making the film we met Winnie Mandela, who spoke of the Observer, and David, with passion and warmth. She was explicit about the impact of the Observer's reporting.

"Had it not been for the coverage of the Observer," she said, "those men would have faced the death penalty. We knew that, and they knew that too: it was the Observer that saved the leadership of the ANC."

Richard Astor, son of David, who also appears in the film, told us: "My brother-in-law interviewed Nelson Mandela and he told me afterwards that Mandela actually said: 'If it hadn't been for David Astor and the Observer, myself and Oliver Tambo would have hanged.'"

Shaun Johnson has no doubt about Astor's contribution: "I am not sure it is understood in London, but of all newspapers in the world, the masthead of the Observer is cherished in South Africa. Because under David's editorship it was not only the first serious newspaper in the world to take Africa seriously, it was the 1st newspaper in the world to take Africans seriously. A major figure like Oliver Tambo was taken seriously first by the Observer.

"And Anthony Sampson played a key role. I think David was the 1st editor to cover Africa in a post-colonial manner."

Even after stepping down as editor, Astor continued to support the struggle against apartheid. He arranged for books to be sent to Mandela and other prisoners on Robben island, and helped the Mandela family financially.

He also helped to set up the Southern African Advanced Education Project in London in 1986, which was designed to help advise and school a whole new generation of South Africans in running the country once the apartheid regime eventually fell.

Nelson Mandela acknowledged Astor and the Observer's contribution on Astor's death 12 years ago, when he said: "Under him, the Observer supported the African National Congress from the early years of apartheid, when we most needed it and when most newspapers ignored it.

"During the years on Robben Island I knew the Observer was continuing to keep myself and my colleagues in the minds of the British people while our names were banned in our own country."

Source: The Guardian, December 8, 2013

South Africa's Supreme Court Abolishes Death Penalty

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

In its 1st major decision, South Africa's recently created supreme court abolished the death penalty today, ending a decades-old practice of executing criminals convicted of serious crimes that had once given the country one of the world's highest rates of capital punishment.

Announcing the unanimous decision, Arthur Chaskalson, president of the Constitutional Court, said, "Everyone, including the most abominable of human beings, has a right to life, and capital punishment is therefore unconstitutional."

That the Constitutional Court chose the death penalty issue for its first major ruling underscored the importance of the issue in a country where for decades execution was used not just as a weapon against common crime, but as a means of terror in enforcing the system of racial separation known as apartheid.

"Retribution cannot be accorded the same weight under our Constitution as the right to life and dignity," Mr. Chaskalson said. "It has not been shown that the death sentence would be materially more effective to deter or prevent murder than the alternative sentence of life imprisonment would be."

In a strong show of support for the ruling, each of the court's 11 judges issued a written opinion backing the decision. The Constitutional Court was created earlier this year as an equal to the executive and legislative branches.

South Africa stopped executing prisoners in 1992 on the orders of the former National Party Government. With violent crime rampant, the number of prisoners awaiting execution on death rows has since swollen to 443. Over 1,100 people were executed in the 1980's. Death sentences were carried out by hanging.

Reacting to the ruling, Justice Minister Dullah Omar said the prisoners would be quickly moved from death row. According to prison wardens, the announcement set off a round of wild celebration among condemned inmates at Pretoria's Central Prison.

Elsewhere, however, comments on the ruling revealed the continuing depths of political division among South Africans that typically run along racial lines, 1 year after the formal end of apartheid.

On radio talk shows today, reactions were deeply split between black and white, with the former typically applauding the abolition of the death penalty, while the latter, invoking high crime rates, criticized what many whites say is a gradual slide away from law and order.

"Under the A.N.C., the message is that people can commit any crime and get away with it," said one caller to a Johannesburg radio station, referring to the African National Congress, the party of President Nelson Mandela.

Crime has become a highly emotional issue among many whites here, even though blacks are overwhelmingly represented among the victims of violence. Last weekend in Johannesburg alone, 42 people were killed, 477 businesses and homes were broken into and 34 women were reported raped.

While whites complained of a spreading sense of impunity, many blacks reacted by noting that they had been disproportionately made victims of the death penalty in the past through wrongful arrests and convictions.

Moreover, with the death penalty much more likely to be applied to blacks than to whites under apartheid, capital punishment had become as powerfully emotional an issue for many blacks as crime has become for many whites.

Mr. Mandela himself made this point in a statement to the court during his trial for incitement in 1962. "I have grave fears that this system of justice may enable the guilty to drag the innocent before the courts," he said. "It enables the unjust to prosecute and demand vengeance against the just. It may tend to lower the standards of fairness applied in the country's courts by white judicial officers to black litigants."

Source: New York Times, June 7, 1995

Nelson Mandela: in his own words

On facing the death penalty, Nelson Mandela spoke from the dock at the culmination of the Rivonia Trial in April 1964:

"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realised. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Source: The Telegraph, December 7, 2013