 Burge Victim Ronald Kitchen is Latest Illinois Death Row Exoneree
On Tuesday, July 07, 2009, 43-year-old Ronald Kitchen, who confessed under extreme physical duress to a taking part in five murders 21 years ago, was exonerated and freed from prison. The confession was extracted by Detective Michael Kill, who worked under Commander Jon Burge. Kitchen spent nine of his 21 years behind bars on death row. He was freed by Judge Paul Biebel, the presiding judge of the Criminal Division of the Cook County Circuit Court, after the Office of the Illinois Attorney General joinedwith attorneys from the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law and the law firm of Baker & McKenzie to request dismissal of the charges. Biebel also freed Kitchen’s equally innocent do-defendant, Marvin Reeves, 50, who was represented by attorneys from Mayer Brown LLP. Kitchen’s conviction rested primarily on his confession, but also involved a jailhouse snitch, Willie Williams, who has admitted that he lied when he testified that Kitchen had confessed the crime to him. The tortured confession implicated Reese in the murders, although he had nothing to do with them. Both convictions rested in part on the failure of Cook County prosecutors to provide defense attorneys with evidence relating to Williams’s credibility . Of 224 men and women sentenced to death under the current Illinois death penalty law, which was enacted in 1977, 20 have now been exonerated and released—an error rate of nearly 9 percent. Kitchen was represented by Thomas F. Geraghty amd Carolyn E. Frazier of the Bluhm Legal Clinic and Mark Oates and Angela Vigil of Baker & McKenzie. Reeves was represented by Michael J. Gill and David D. Pope of Mayer Brown. Note from Prof. Steve Drizin, Director, Center on Wrongful Conviction: Over 60 students over 9 years at the Bluhm Legal Clinic and two major law firms worked to obtain the release of Ronald Kitchen, the 20th man from Illinois’s broken death row system, and Marvin Reeves who was serving five life without parole sentences. Both Reeves and Kitchen were victimized by Jon Burge’s crew who systematically tortured over 150 black men in Chicago’s Area 2 from the late 1970’s through the early 1990’s. Kitchen gave police a false confession and both men were also convicted on the basis of snitch testimony. As is often the case with snitches, prosecutors failed to disclose the full extent of their dealings with the snitch and the incentives which backed-up his testimony. Kudos go to Tom Geraghty, the Bluhm Legal Clinic’s Director of over 35 years and Carolyn Frazier, one of his students who stayed with the case after leaving the Clinic and then picked it back up when she came to work at the Clinic, and to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan who made the decision to grant Kitchen’s motion for a new trial and then to nolle prosse the case against him. For more about this fascinating case, check out this video on You Tube. |
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