Illinois Governor George Ryan has granted pardons to four inmates on death row. He said ''a manifest injustice'' had occurred when they were apparently tortured into confessing by Chicago police.

He is also expected on Saturday to commute many of the state's remaining 150 death sentences to life in prison."

Update: Ryan's press conference Saturday on who will get clemency (meaning their death sentences will be converted to life sentences without) will be at 1:00 pm at Northwestern University.

According to the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, 23 percent of the people who are exonerated after conviction turn out to have falsely confessed to the crime. Many of those confessions were taped and played as compelling evidence to a jury. As the jogger case and other reversals demonstrate, innocent people can be led into confessions. Their questioners — wittingly or not — also often provide them with details that would seem to be known only to the real criminal....

Beyond the injustice of punishing the wrong people, false admissions of guilt allow the real culprits to remain free to commit more crimes, as did Matias Reyes, who raped four other women, killing one of them, after he attacked the jogger in Central Park....

By videotaping every minute of interrogations, the police would help protect themselves against charges of coercion, improve the integrity of confessions and plug a gaping hole in the system.

Only Alaska and Minnesota now require videotaping of interrogations. Bill Perkins, a city council member in New York, has introduced a bill to require it.
If you are in New York, get on the horn (or the internet or to a fax machine) and support it.