HANDS OFF CAIN ASK GOVERNOR RYAN TO GRANT CLEMENCY

Dear Governor Ryan, Hands Off Cain recognizes your great merit in being the first governor of a US state to impose a legal moratorium on executions. We now ask of you one last vital gesture before the conclusion of your mandate: a pardon for all death row inmates in your state. If politics, parliaments, governments and influential sectors of society were not always a step ahead of public opinion (and this is especially true where freedom and civil rights are concerned), they would be abdicating their role as leaders and accepting to be reduced to dogmatic and neutral notaries of popular whims. And there would have been very few breakthroughs on the human rights front. A case in point: John Fitzgerald Kennedy´s and Martin Luther King´s America. Justice, as applied by man, without grace or mercy, is a literally ruthless, mutilated kind of justice. Being against the death penalty does not mean forgetting the victims and not being on their side. On the contrary, we think being against the death penalty means remembering the victims in a more just and complete manner. The phrase "Hands Off Cain" does not mean overlooking Abel. In the same way, justice applied with mercy - as opposed to retributive justice - does not absolve Cain of his responsibility. Human justice must be able to acknowledge the innocence that is conquered through time, the innocence of becoming - day after day in the course of penance - a person different to the one who committed the crime, having gained an innocence which is, perhaps, more authentic because constantly renewed.A state which decides to execute a person - after one, ten or twenty years - is in reality killing an innocent human being or one who can become thus in the course of the expiation of his crime, if given time.A death sentence is a sentence that puts an end to time - the condemned person is trapped in the past, having no future ahead. The death penalty fossilizes a human being in the criminal act he has committed. It is the brand of infamy, that indelibly labels a person forever, saying: you will never change! The death penalty is not justice´s supreme triumph but its supreme defeat. Not only does the death sentence represent the loss of our sense of humanity but also of a civilised way of life.Together with you, we wish to give someone who has done wrong the opportunity for a rebirth, and to his punishment the force of redemption.This is why Hands Off Cain is asking you, Governor Ryan, to use the last precious weeks of your mandate to carry out a gesture of great significance to you, to us and all humankind: concede a pardon to all the people condemned to die in Illinois.