Posted on 12/17/2002 9:34:34 AM PST by yankeedame
'Dead men' walk for cause of justice
December 17, 2002
BY ANDREW HERRMANN AND BILL ZWECKER STAFF REPORTERS
In 1998, Curtis Kyles found justice in a Louisiana courtroom, where new evidence freed him from Death Row.
On Monday, he found Justice on the other side of La Grange Road.
Wearing a thin leather jacket and a borrowed scarf, Kyles marched against a biting wind into the southwest suburb of Justice as part of a 37-mile relay from Joliet to Chicago. Dubbed "Dead Men Walking,'' the march featured 30 former condemned men from around the country.
Starting in the predawn darkness at Stateville Correctional Center--once the place where Illinois prisoners were executed--the march featured the ex-cons walking in shifts to deliver a letter to Gov. Ryan at the James R. Thompson Center in the Loop.
That letter, part of a campaign urging Ryan to commute all death sentences in Illinois to life in prison without parole, asks the governor to "heed the lessons of our ordeals.'' In accepting the letter, a Ryan spokesman suggested to reporters the governor was not inclined to issue a blanket commutation.
Kyles, 43, who still lives near New Orleans, acknowledged "it's much warmer back home,'' but he came to Chicago because "the injustice that was done to me, I don't want to see it done to nobody else.''
Kyles, now a bricklayer, spent more than 15 years behind bars for the 1984 murder of a woman in a store parking lot. He was freed when witnesses recanted and new evidence pointed to another man.
The march was sponsored by Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions.
On Monday night, Ryan attended a play, "The Exonerated,'' at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, 777 N. Green, in which Hollywood actors portrayed some of the wrongly convicted.
The actors, including Richard Dreyfuss and Danny Glover, also presented Ryan with a letter asking that he give life sentences to the 140 Death Row inmates in Illinois.
In an interview, Dreyfuss said he does not oppose capital punishment. "If there was a perfect system, I would be more than happy to see [murderers] killed--and tortured,'' he said. But that system does not exist now, he said.
Contributing: Maureen O'Donnell
Scratch a Stalinist, find . . . a Stalinist.
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