Thirty former condemned men from around the United...

Thirty former condemned men from around the United States marched against a biting wind in a 37-mile relay from Joliet to Chicago, Illinois. Dubbed "Dead Men Walking,'' the march started in the predawn darkness at Stateville Correctional Centre--once the place where Illinois prisoners were executed. The march featured the ex-cons walking in shifts to deliver a letter to Governor George Ryan at the James R. Thompson Center in the Loop. Seven former death row inmates from Illinois participated in the march, as did ex-prisoners from Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia. 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. The march was sponsored by Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions. In the evening, 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 over 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.