Chicago ? Calling the death penalty process “arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral,” Gov. George Ryan cleared Illinois’ death row Saturday, commuting 167 condemned inmates’ sentences in the broadest attack on the death penalty in decades.

Ryan’s decision, which came three years after he temporarily halted state executions to examine the system’s fairness, was quickly denounced by prosecutors, the incoming governor and relatives of some murder victims.

“Every one of the victims, he has killed them all over again,” said Cathy Drobney. Her daughter Bridget was killed in 1985 by Robert Turner, whose sentence was commuted.

It was a sharp contrast from the jubilant reaction at Northwestern University, where journalism students investigating Illinois death-row cases have helped exonerate some inmates. Ryan’s speech was attended by a who’s who of anti-death penalty activists.

“Gov. Ryan has taught us what leading truly looks like,” said Lawrence C. Marshall, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. “This is greatness, my friends.”

The mass commutation was the sharpest blow to capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1972, forcing states to redraw their laws to make them more equitable.

It came two days before the Republican leaves office as one of the nation’s most influential anti-death penalty advocates — a legacy he has embraced even as an ongoing federal corruption investigation targeting his tenure as secretary of state ruined his chances for re-election and made him a pariah within his own party.

Ryan said he sympathized with the families of the men, women and children who had been murdered, but he felt he had to act.

“I am not prepared to take the risk that we may execute an innocent person,” he wrote in an overnight letter to the victims’ families warning them of his plans.

That reasoning didn’t add up for prosecutors.

“The great, great majority of these people that have petitioned for commutation … did not even contest their guilt,” said Peoria County State’s Atty. Kevin Lyons. “He’s disingenuous when he says that certainty is the issue.”

Illinois Gov. George Ryan speaks at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago. Ryan announced Saturday he would clear Illinois' death row by commuting the sentences of all condemned inmates.

With death-row inmates he had recently pardoned sitting in the audience as he spoke Saturday, Ryan framed the death penalty issue as “one of the great civil rights struggles of our time.”

“Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error — error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die,” Ryan said. “What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?”

Ryan had halted all executions in the state nearly three years earlier after courts found that 13 Illinois death row inmates had been wrongly convicted since capital punishment resumed in 1977 — a period when 12 other inmates were executed.

He said studies conducted since that moratorium was issued had only raised more questions about the how the death penalty was imposed. He cited problems with trials, sentencing, the appeals process and the state’s “spectacular failure” to reform the system.

“Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious — and therefore immoral — I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” he said.

Other governors have issued similar moratoriums and commutations, but nothing on the scale of what Ryan has done. The most recent blanket clemency came in 1986 when the governor of New Mexico commuted the death sentences of the state’s five death-row inmates.

Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, who last year issued the country’s only other moratorium on state executions, has no plans to pardon or commute the sentences of any death-row inmate before leaving office Wednesday, spokesman Chuck Porcari said.

Corrections Department spokesman Sergio Molina said Ryan had signed commutation orders for 167 people — 156 on death row and other in jails awaiting hearings or sentencing for other crimes.

Within a week the department will start moving prisoners out of the state’s two “condemned units” and into the general population of maximum-security prisons, Molina said.

Vern Feuling, whose son William was shot and killed in 1985 by a man now on death row, was outraged that the killer would be allowed to live.

“My son is in the ground for 17 years and justice is not done,” Feuling said. “This is like a mockery.”

Incoming Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, also criticized Ryan’s action, calling blanket clemency “a big mistake.” Each case should be reviewed individually, Blagojevich said. “You’re talking about people who’ve committed murder.”

Ryan on Friday went a step farther in four other death row cases, issuing pardons for four men he said had been tortured by police into making false confessions.