JOLIET, Ill., Dec. 16 (UPI) -- They call it "Dead Men Walking."
Some 40 exonerated death row inmates Monday marched 37 miles from the Stateville Correctional Center to Chicago to convince Gov. George Ryan to grant clemency to condemned prisoners still on death row.
The former inmates walked 1 mile each in relays passing a letter asking the governor to commute all death sentences to life in prison without parole.
"We implore you to heed the lessons of our ordeal," the letter from the ex-inmates says. "The system that convicted us and sentenced us to die is far too flawed to be trusted to extinguish human life."
Anthony Porter, who came within two days of execution for the slayings of a young couple in a South Side Chicago park, will deliver the letter to Ryan, who imposed a moratorium on executions in Illinois in 1999 partly in response to national publicity over his case.
Porter is one of 13 Illinois death row inmates set free by DNA evidence or confessions from other people. The case made headlines when journalism students from Northwestern University tracked down a Milwaukee man who gave an investigator a videotaped confession.
Ryan suspended all executions in the state and appointed a blue-ribbon panel to study Illinois' death penalty laws. The commission recommended 85 reforms now being debated in the state Legislature.
In October, Ryan ordered a clemency board to review all 160 capital cases prompting nine days of emotion-filled, at times horrifically painful, testimony from family members of murder victims and survivors of deadly attacks. He must decide on clemency before he leaves office Jan. 13.
The walk began at 4:30 a.m. at the Stateville prison when former inmate Gary Gauger, accompanied Law Professor Lawrence Marshall, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, headed north on Route 53.
"The death penalty is wrong and we need to repeal it," said Gauger who eventually was acquitted in the slaying of his parents. Two motorcycle gang members were convicted of the slayings on the Gauger's McHenry County farm.
Executions in Illinois once were carried out at Stateville but moved to the super-maximum prison in Tamms, Ill., 10 miles north of the state's southern tip and 365 miles south of Chicago, where the state's last execution was carried out in 1999.
Actor Mike Farrell will play Gauger Monday night in a special performance of the play, "The Exonerated," based on interviews with 40 former death row inmates later found innocent. Richard Dreyfuss was expected to play Kerry Max; Danny Glover, Delbert Tibbs; and actress Jill Clayburgh, Sonia Jacobs.
The 4-year-old Center on Wrongful Convictions blames a flawed capital punishment system for the wrongful convictions and death sentences of 102 cases nationally.
