One year after beginning a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence for racketeering and fraud, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan still hasn’t admitted to or apologized for the systematic corruption that marked his single term as governor and his two terms as secretary of state.

Now, Illinois’ senior U.S. senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, is considering asking President George W. Bush to commute the sentence of Ryan, a Republican. Ryan’s convictions would stand, but he would get to go home to Kankakee, Ill. Ryan’s lawyers last week filed a formal clemency request with the Justice Department.

Ryan was convicted in 2006 for steering state contracts to friends and associates in exchange for cash, gifts and vacations. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.

Ryan, 74, has maintained his innocence. On the day before he reported to prison, he told Post-Dispatch reporter Kevin McDermott that his conscience was clear. “And I have said since the beginning of this 10-year ordeal that I am innocent, and I intend to prove that.”

If he still believes that, he should stay at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. If he’s ready to apologize and admit his wrong-doing, then a commuted sentence may be in order.

Mr. Durbin is not asking the president to pardon Ryan, which would be improper. The conviction should stand, both because the severity of his crimes is inexcusable and because his conviction serves as a stark warning that corruption in government should not be tolerated — not even in Illinois, not even in Chicago.

But Ryan’s achievements in Illinois are worth remembering.

• He invested $12 billion in the state’s schools, roads and transportation through his “Illinois FIRST” initiative, mostly paid for with a $30 increase in drivers license fees. Improvements included widening and expanding major thoroughfares in St. Clair and Madison counties and extending MetroLink to MidAmerica Airport.
• He made the first visit by an American governor to Cuba in four decades in what this page called “the highest-profile rebuke to the antiquated U.S. embargo against Cuba since the pope’s visit.”
• A longtime critic of health maintenance organizations, Ryan signed a bill granting new rights to HMO patients.
• He supported gay rights, a courageous step for any Republican politician.
• And, most famously, he removed all prisoners from Illinois’ death row in January 2003, two days before leaving office. Ryan pardoned four of the inmates and commuted the sentences of all the others to life in prison.

All of these acts, but particularly his stand against capital punishment, speak to fundamental decency in a substantially flawed man. The governor was haunted by the case of Anthony Porter, who spent 15 years on death row and had been close to execution before a Northwestern University journalism class proved his innocence. Between 1977 and 2000, 13 inmates who had been convicted and sentenced to death were exonerated of their crimes. During that same time period, Illinois executed 12 people.

In January 2000, Ryan called for a moratorium on executions, the first governor in the country to do so since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1972.

Mr. Durbin said a commuted sentence would be appropriate because Ryan has suffered enough. “He has, at an advanced moment of his life, been removed from his family,” Mr. Durbin said at a news conference Thursday in Springfield, Ill. “He has lost the economic security which most people count on at his age. And he is separated from his wife at a time when she is in frail health. To say that he has paid a price for his wrongdoing — he certainly has. And the question is whether continued imprisonment is appropriate at this point.”

Ryan now must find it within his conscience to acknowledge and apologize for his crimes. If he can do so before mid-January, a commutation of his sentence to time served would serve the cause of justice.