Former Illinois Governor George Ryan, who had the courage to commute the sentences of all death row inmates in the state to life imprisonment without parole after so many of them were found to have been wrongfully convicted, was sentenced today to 6 1/2 years in federal prison on bribery charges. The Judge threw out two charges against him, and the prosecutors had asked for 8 to 10 years, but at 71, and suffering from Crohn's disease and diabetes, the sentence will undoubtedly take from Ryan the most productive years he has left.

The case was prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald's office, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame investigation. As TalkLeft commenter Scribe noted in an e-mail to me earlier today:

The last line is telling about Fitz: of 79 people charged, 75 were convicted, 68 sentenced, 2 were fugitives, 1 case was dismissed. Regardless of what one thinks about prosecutors or cops, any lawyer with that kind of record in a complex, major case has to know what he's doing So, what is it the Republicans are talking about when they say Fitz ran around abusing his discretion?