Death Row inmate Ronald Kitchen discussed police brutality and the capital punishment system via a telephone from Cook County Jail with about 60 people gathered in University Hall 112 on Thursday night.
Kitchen is one of the Death Row Ten, a group of inmates who allegedly were tortured by Chicago police officers in order to obtain their confessions. The group claims to have been slapped, shocked and suffocated at police headquarters in Chicago by former Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives.
Kitchen said he has vivid memories of his interrogation.
“I can visualize the whole thing,” he said. “It’s something I have to live with every day.
“Being handcuffed to a wall and being beaten up by people while hollering for help is something that you can always visualize. It’s going to be a part of me forever and even today I wake up in a cold sweat, angry,” Kitchen said.
Although black and Latino men are only 20 percent of the population, they constitute 80 percent of those on Death Row. Kitchen, who is black, was charged with stabbing and strangling two women and three children in 1988 and was convicted and sentenced to death.
Grace Louva Bell, Kitchen’s mother, spoke to the crowd about her son’s interrogation and proclaimed his innocence.
“They beat him with a telephone book in the groin, bashed his head against the wall and handcuffed him to a bench,” Bell said. “The lawyer did not do the job he’s supposed to do. Me and my family did the investigation.”
Bell said that Kitchen was at a party when the murders occurred.
“Why would he kill children?” his mother asked. “Ronny loved children. Why would he kill a woman for $1,000 worth of drugs?
“A mother knows the personality of her child,” she said. “I’m speaking not just for my son, but for all of the sons on Death Row,” she said.
Kitchen said the Death Row system is too flawed to fix. He attempted to describe a typical day on Death Row, but said it was too emotional to put in words. He said that waking up with the realization that he is facing death “is not a comfortable situation at all.”
The event was co-sponsored by the Northwestern chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Campaign to End the Death Penalty, International Socialist Organization and Amnesty International.
Education senior Claire O’Connor, the president of Northwestern’s chapter of Amnesty International, said she helped organize the event to raise awareness about the moratorium imposed on the death penalty by Gov. George Ryan two years ago.
“I wanted to call attention to the fragility of the moratorium,” O’Connor said. “There is no guarantee that it will stay in place. Depending on who’s in office next, they could end the moratorium entirely.”
She said she plans to have at least one death penalty-related event a year to keep the momentum against the death penalty going.
“This is a grassroots-level effort to let people know that it’s an issue that matters,” she said.
O’Connor emphasized the importance of putting a human face on the issue and said she is trying to create a chapter of Campaign to End the Death Penalty at NU.
“People who are for or against the death penalty read about the issue secondhand, but hearing a personal voice does a lot to humanize and personalize the issue to individuals who are affected,” she said.
Weinberg sophomore Rachael Pierce said she was moved by hearing the voices of Kitchen and his mother.
“It emphasized human contact more than just another statistic,” Pierce said. “People who are in jail are made out to be bad people, but when we hear their voices, we realize that they’re not such bad people.”
