OXFORD, Wis. | A day after proclaiming his innocence, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan's final act as a free man last week was to switch cars en route from Chicago to Wisconsin, then slip in the back way to a federal prison here to avoid the media.

Ryan stands convicted of fleecing Illinois while holding its highest office. He'll probably be in prison until he's at least 79 years old. His political career is, without question, over.

But the question remains about something that may have been central in Ryan's mind since long before be was convicted last year: legacy.

"You don't run for elective office if you don't have a significant ego ... (and) legacy is important from the standpoint of ego satisfaction," said Mike Lawrence, a former top aide to ex-Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, and who now leads the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. "All of them want to be remembered for what they accomplished in public office.

Today, Ryan is viewed by many of his fellow Illinoisans as a crook who cashed in on his influence from the governor's office. But in much of the world outside his home state, he's seen as a heroic opponent of the death penalty. He long has made it obvious that he cares deeply about which of those two versions of his life gets top billing in the history books.

Some two years after Ryan made headlines around the world by commuting the sentence of every inmate on Illinois' death row, a federal jury assembled in Chicago to consider criminal charges. Meanwhile, death penalty opponents were submitting the governor's name to officials in Norway seeking to have him considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.

"When you add it all up, it was George Ryan who really opened up this entire debate about the death penalty in America," said Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana who is once again submitting Ryan's name next year for a Nobel Prize. "He's a visionary ... but obviously, a lot of the media in this state don't see it that way."

Ryan's attorney, fellow former Gov. Jim Thompson, attempted to shore up Ryan's legacy before escorting him to prison.

"He was my lieutenant governor twice, and he served admirably in that post," Thompson reminded reporters. "It's a hard thing to contemplate that a man who has given so much, at his age, now faces the prospect of over six years in a penitentiary."

But Ryan himself -- in his last public appearance before becoming inmate No. 16627-424 at the Federal Correctional Institution at Oxford, Wis. -- appeared less concerned with the 6 1/2-year prison sentence ahead of him than with the image of himself he was leaving behind.

"To the people of Illinois, I'm not blind to the sentiment that some hold," Ryan told reporters Tuesday night outside his Kankakee home. "But I want you to know that I did my best."