Very seldom in life is there a time when one feels truly inspried. When there is that moment when you know that a part of you has changed forever, and that you will think about the world and your life in a different way. Well I was fortunate enough to have one of those moments last night when attending a town meeting held by the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
Going into it I knew very little about the Jon Burge case, or the police tortures that went on in Chicago in the 70's, 80's and early 90's. For those who don't know much about it, Jon Burge became a police officer in the early 70's after her served in Vietnam. He would eventually work his way up to being the police chief. During that time, Burge along with other officers tortured over 110 individuals, using techniques such as shock therapy, suffocation, violence, etc in order to get false confessions. Many of this torture victims were found guilty solely based upon their flase confessions, and were sentenced to life w/o parole, or death row. The states attorneys office, the judges, and the rest of the legal system chose to ignore these victims when they said they were tortured, making them in many ways as guilty as Burge himself. If you are interested in the case and want to know more, you can find it at
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-police-torture-scandal-a-whos-who/Content?oid=1921098
So back to last night, the panel at the meeting was made up of four of the torture victims who have since been released from prison after 20-30 years in jail, two of whom were even on death row. They told us their stories, and how there are still 23 torture victims still on death row, and about how important this fight was. The eloquence they spoke with blew me away, and you could see in their eyes how hard it was to speak about what had happened. Yet here they were, because to them it was worth revisiting that pain, and those memories if it meant spreading the importance of the issue. These individuals are some of the bravest people I have met, and I left the meeting feeling just completely inspired.
After that I knew that I needed to do something soon, and so I believe now that my internship is going to either be working with these individuals, and helping with this cause, or working at the center for wrongful convictions at the Bluhm Clinic with northwestern. Either way I am just so excited that I had that moment where it clicked and I figured out what I wanted to do with this semester.
The four of them also talked about all the people who have been activists for the cause and they said something that stuck with me till this moment.
"These people gave us faces in the world outside of the classroom"
Anyways, without going on for to much longer, it was a experience that will last with me forever, and I encourage everyone to look into the cause and hopefully feel as inspired by it as I did.
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