Ryan's fading hopes now in Supreme Court's hands

CHICAGO -- George Ryan went to the nation's highest court Wednesday with his fast-fading hopes of staying out of a windblown federal prison camp in Minnesota where inmates mop the floors and clean toilets.

The 73-year-old former governor is under orders to report Wednesday to the camp where former governor Dan Walker did time in the 1980s and said he was strip searched by guards even though "it was damned cold."

Ryan and co-defendant Larry Warner have been free on bond pending appeal of their April 2006 conviction for millions of dollars in fraud.

But the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday effectively canceled the bonds and said it was time to start serving the sentences.

"Although they would undoubtedly like to postpone the day of reckoning as long as they can, they have come to the end of the line as far as this court is concerned," Judge Diane P. Wood said in her five-page opinion.

Ryan's chief defense counsel, former governor James R. Thompson, immediately asked Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens for a new bond. The petition was addressed to Stevens, because he is the justice who handles such matters arising in the Chicago appeals court.

The petition renewed Ryan's claims that chaotic jury deliberations made it impossible for the two defendants to get a fair trial.

"No trial is perfect -- to be sure. But perhaps no federal trial has ever been as deeply and fundamentally flawed as this one," they said.

Getting a bond from the Supreme Court is a long shot.

"It hasn't happened for the last 35 years, I don't believe, but I've never seen a stronger case," Thompson said. He was encouraged by appeals Judge Michael S. Kanne's dissent, saying that the six-month trial before District Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer was "riddled with errors."

Even if Stevens refuses to set bond, there is a chance that Ryan will be able to avoid serving time at the federal correctional institution in Duluth, Minn.

His attorneys are trying to get him reassigned to Oxford, Wis., where other celebrity defendants from Chicago have served time.

But there are tougher places to serve time than Duluth.

"He's not going to be doing hard time," said Lyle Wildes, a convicted drug dealer who spent seven years of a 22-year sentence there.

Walker, however, said the 18 months he served for improprieties involving a savings and loan association long after he was governor were a nightmare.

"I certainly hope Gov. Ryan doesn't have the same terrible experiences that I had there," he said in a telephone interview.

Walker said a kindly warden gave him a job as a clerk in the chapel. But he said the next warden decided to make life tough, forcing him to clean toilets and snare cigarette butts with a nail on the end of a stick.