“Each day, I look for a different twist as to how to expose the horrors of death row and the flawed system to the public.”
Darby Tillis (1943-2014), Illinois death row exoneree
This summer saw the death of Chicago resident, Anthony Porter at 66, a man whose capital wrongful conviction case became a watershed moment in the fight to abolish Illinois’ racist death penalty system. In 1999, after spending 17 years on death row for a crime he did not commit and within hours of execution, activists and attorneys won a stay of execution giving time for investigators to find the people who did the crime. His release from prison brought out just about every local media outlet. Within a year Republican Governor George Ryan, formerly a supporter of the death penalty, declared a moratorium on executions. Multiple death penalty clemencies followed. In 2003, Ryan commuted all the death sentences to life without parole,stating “To say it plainly one more time—the Illinois capital punishment system is broken. It has taken innocent men to a haired breath escape from their unjust execution.” By 2011 Illinois abolished its death penalty.
Newspaper outlets from the Chicago Tribune to Newsweek announcing Anthony’s death are correct to point to the uniqueness of Anthony’s case—a stay 48 hours from execution based on his low IQ,giving time for students from Northwestern Law School’s Medill Journalism department to find Alstory Simon who confessed on video tape to the double murder that sentenced Anthony to Death Row. However, they fail to explain how his stay and subsequent release, as former Northwestern law professor Lawrence Marshall stated, “put the nail in the coffin” of Illinois’ death penalty system.”
It was still legal to put to death a person with diminished mental capacity, and states were certainly not immune from killing people with low IQs. Just five short years earlier presidential hopeful Bill Clinton put a stop on his campaign trail to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so disabled that he saved his dessert for after his execution. His case was also preceded by multiple exonerations and was not the only sensational case. Gary Gauger who was falsely accused of killing his entire family was exonerated in 1996, three years before Anthony.
What made Anthony’s case break the clemency dam and what the media has been short to point out was the activism that took place around his case and others before and after his release. Three years before Governor Ryan declared Illinois’ death penalty system “broken” and prior to Anthony’s stay of execution, activists from the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) and the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty staged a rally and press conference outside of the State of Illinois building to highlight the fact that the state was about to put to death a man with a 51 IQ. The event was picked up by local media and within hours the Supreme Court had decided Anthony didn’t have capacity to understand what was happening to him and so granted him a stay of execution. Months prior to his release Marshall headed up the organization of a wrongful conviction conference that gathered 30 exonerees.
Even more significantly was the activism that followed his release. Anthony’s release was a game changer because he didn’t enter into a vacuum. There was already a very active burgeoning abolitionist movement around wrongful conviction and police torture on the ground prior to his release that could catapult the issue of innocence and the death penalty the moment he got out. He immediately went on a speaking tour throughout Chicago. CEDP activists invited Anthony to speak on death penalty abolition forums that drew hundreds of people,standing room only crowds, and overwhelming media coverage.
The message was always the same: Illinois currently houses many wrongful conviction cases on its death row just like Anthony’s. He travelled by bus to Philadelphia to speak at a rally attended by thousands for Mumia Abu Jamal, a political prisoner railroaded to death row on the false charges of killing a police officer, a man whose case had garnered national attention and built a nation-wide movement against the death penalty. On stage before thousands of attendees Anthony said, “I spent 17 years on Death Row. I was on Death Row for something I didn’t do. An innocent man. Twenty-three hours a day in a box. . .. Look at me. I’m a witness.”
Anthony was a witness to more than death row. As a child growing up on Chicago’s southside, he experienced privation and police harassment at a level most can’t even imagine. The area had been in an economic decline since the collapse of the meatpacking and steal industries in the 1960s through the 1980s. By the time Anthony was growing up there the main economy was illicit drugs. Funds that could have been used to improve housing and schools were put instead into law enforcement.
He lived in the neighborhoods described in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness: “The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to the police presence in Black communities as ‘The Occupation.’” In a world with continual police harassment and little incentive and means to prosper, Anthony dropped out of DuSable High School before his junior year. His mother raised nine children alone in a housing project on public aid. His oldest brother, Larry, was shot to death by a Chicago police officer when Anthony was 16. One school counselor said Anthony needed”urgent help, educationally and socially.” Help never came.
Once he committed his first crime, he was no longer free: As Alexander describes,
Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and largely less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
From the age of 17 to 27 he was questioned for multiple crimes, but charges were dropped. He was convicted of robbery, bail jumping and aggravated battery.
When Anthony heard police were looking for him concerning a double murder, he went down to the police station. There police officers slapped a murder conviction on him. Porter was sentenced to death for the 1982 murder of a teenage couple, Jerry Hillard and Marilyn Green, in a park on Chicago’s South Side.
In September 1983 the case went to trial. The family thought it best to go with a private attorney, but he never got the defense he deserved. The lawyer, Akim Gursel, fell asleep during the trial and had to be awakened by the judge and only called three witnesses. He failed to call witnesses that could have identified other suspects like Alstory Simon and Inez Jackson who were involved in a drug dispute with the victims (Simon was convicted of the murders after Anthony’s release), evidence that would have been corroborated by the victim’s sister Christina Green. The attorney admitted stopping his investigation after the Porter family could pay only $3,000 of his $10,000 fee. Predictably, Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to death row. After seventeen years in an 8 by 10 cell and having lost all his post-conviction appeals, he was exonerated and released back into the same southside Chicago neighborhoods where he grew up. As Monica Davey, of Chicago tribune reported
No picture can cover up the dilapidated state of Mrs. Porter’s apartment—the golf ball-size hole in the door, the basketball-size hole in the ceiling, or the phone numbers scrawled in pencil on the living room wall.
A constant stream of friends and relatives stops in, some crashing for the night on plastic-covered couches and tucking their folded clothes under sofa cushions for storage. The Green Line grinds past the living room window, past the tattered apartment buildings and vacant lots.
Porter has deep and painful roots in this community. Although he received a paltry $145,875 from the state as “compensation” for subjecting him to 17 years of wrongful imprisonment, he lost his civil suit charging prosecutorial and police misconduct, and with no education and surrounded by drugs, he slid into much of the lifestyle he had left behind. He said “everybody keeps talking about a job…. What kind of job am I going to do?” His cause of death was “anoxic brain injury due to probable opioid toxicity,” according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Anthony’s case resembles so many others who never got a fair trial. The area he grew up in was home to the notorious Area Two police precinct run by former police commander Jon Burge who had operated a torture ring for twenty with a dozen veteran detectives who forced Black men to confess to crimes that they did not commit. The most egregious were ten men on death row at the time of Anthony’s release who began a campaign called The Death Row 10 to garner support for their release. These cops used electroshock and suffocation among other torture tactics. Mayor Daley was the State Attorney and allowed the prosecution of these cases despite knowing full well about the forced confessions. Richard Devine the current State Attorney was Assistance States Attorney to Daley at the time.
The entire death penalty system that convicted Anthony was rife with corruption.In a five-part Chicago Tribune series that appeared after Anthony’s release, reporters highlighted the deep seeded roots of corruption under Illinois’ death penalty system. They showed how time and time again prosecutors sacrificed justice to enhance their careers. Anthony was simply a notch in a belt, another solved case. It didn’t matter if he did the crime or not, so long as they could close the case. His case exposes the issues of innocence, representation, mental health, racism, and police and prosecutorial misconduct in administering Illinois’ death penalty system.
Yet as we mourn Anthony’s death and the vicious corrupt political system that brought him down, we should never lose sight of the energetic, creative and active movement against the death penalty that lead to his freedom. In State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, early twentieth century revolutionary and theorist, said the state exists because of the irreconcilable nature of the class differences. For one brief shining moment that state shook. Politicians did not simply have a change of heart. Activists helped fire up the conservative Governor from Kankakee to make statements such as, “The legislature can’t reform it. Lawmakers won’t repeal it” And I won’t stand for it.” It took the protests, press conferences and civil disobedience of prisoner, family member, exoneree, attorney, and ordinary activists to convince a Republican pro-death penalty governor to see not just the issue of innocence but the racism and corruption at the core of Illinois’ death penalty system.
The day before he commuted all of Illinois’ death sentences, he pardoned four of the Death Row Ten (all African American) after narrating the details of torture through electroshock and suffocation suffered by these men at the hands of veteran Chicago cops before a world-wide audience.
Anthony Porter and his case became a symbol of everything that is wrong with the death penalty not simply because it was unique, but because activists were able to paint a human face on the victims and to expose how similar his was to other cases. Out of 176 death row inmates, 76% were Black. The fight for abolition was a human rights issue. Just before Governor Ryan gave blanket commutations he said:
And while we’re not in Civil War now, we’re facing what is shaping up to be one of the great civil rights struggles of our time. Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights has taken the position that the death penalty is sought with increasing frequency against the poor and minorities.
Activists are justified in claiming the victory mantle for their part in the struggle to end capital punishment in Illinois. For them Anthony Porter is far more than “exhibit A” or a case that put a nail in a coffin. He is one of the fighters who helped abolish the death penalty. His willingness to speak out immediately after his release gave the movement just the boost it needed to come crashing on to the highest echelons of Illinois’ political power structure. He triggered a tsunami that shattered the lies and cover up that kept Illinois’ death penalty system intact. Let us remember the innocent man who lived for seventeen years, 23 hours per day, “in a box,” a man who would proclaim before thousands that he was also a witness.Anthony’s victory over Illinois corrupt criminal justice system is one for the history books. Rest in power,my friend.
Joan Parkin is an author, professor, social justice activist, and revolutionary socialist. She was the coordinator of Chicago’s Death Row 10 Campaign (torture victims of former police commander Jon Burge), and co-founder and former director of the Incarcerated Student Program. She still teaches college courses in California prisons.
