The Death Row Ten: Interrupting Illinois' Death Machine
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No. 3 * Symposium 2015
The Death Row Ten: Interrupting Illinois' Death Machine
Alice Kim*
In the long run, the people are our only appeal.
The only ones who can free us are ourselves. Assata Shakur
In 1998, a group of African American men on Illinois' death row organ-
ized a powerful campaign from their prison cells to save their lives.' Calling
themselves the Death Row Ten, these men and their mothers linked up with
activists to demand justice in their cases and an end to the barbaric practice of
capital punishment.2 Over a span of nearly twenty years, each of the Death
Row Ten had been tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge
or other white officers under his command, making them among at least 117
documented cases of torture at Area Two and Area Three police headquarters
on the South Side of Chicago between 1972 to 199 .3 The Death Row Ten
defied a corrupt legal and political system that not only relied on forced con-
fessions to sentence them to death but also covered up police torture at the
expense of their lives. Their struggle profoundly interrupted Illinois' death
machine.
In the late 1990s, several forces coalesced in Illinois: tenacious litigation,
veracious investigative journalism, and a new growing wave of social protest
against police violence and the death penalty. The convergence of these factors
forced a spotlight on wrongful convictions and racial bias in the criminal legal
system, and Illinois became ground zero for the movement against capital pun-
ishment in the United States. The Death Row Ten's organizing efforts played a
critical role in catalyzing and shaping this burgeoning movement, yet their
* Alice Kim is a co-founder of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. She is the Editor of Praxis
Center, an online social justice resource center hosted by the Arcus Center for Social Justice
Leadership. She is a longtime death penalty and prison abolitionist and worked with death row
prisoners and their family members to abolish capital punishment in Illinois. She teaches at
Stateville Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for men, through the Prison +
Neighborhood Arts Project. She is a Soros Justice Fellow and is co-authoring a book about the
struggles for justice in the Burge torture cases with Joey Mogul.
I See generally Joan Parkin & Alice Kim, Meet The Death Row Ten - A victory for the Death
Row Ten: The Struggle Continues, THE NEW ABOLITIONIST (May 2003), http://www.nodeath
penalty.org/new-abolitionist/may-2003-issue-28/meet-death-row-10 [hereinafter Kim].
2 Id.
3 Frederick H. Lowe, Chicago Pays Up: $5.5 million Reparations for Wrongly Convicted Black
Men, NEW AMERICAN MEDIA, Feb. 3, 2016, http://newamericamedia.org/trending/2016/02/
chicago-pays-up-55-million-reparations-for-wrongly-convicted-black-men-I.php [hereinafter
Lowe].
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The Death Row Ten: Interrupting Illinois' Death Machine
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