Injustice Watch (https://www.injusticewatch.org/series/the-long-wait/)
A series about the parole process for a small group of Illinois inmates incarcerated on crimes from the 1970s
Attorneys for a Chicago man convicted of a 1976 police killing argued before a packed Illinois appellate courtroom Thursday that the prisoner was found guilty and given a sentence of several hundred years by a judge trying to conceal his own corruption.
Getting voting records of the members of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board dating back to 2013 was no easy task. Those records reveal a system in which aging prisoners locked up at least 40 years have almost no chance of winning support for their release from the board members, a majority of whom have denied about four of every five cases.
In 1977, a judge convicted an 18-year old of murder and sentenced him to 200-to-600 years in prison. Forty years later, the prisoners’ attorneys contend the trial and sentencing were an improper effort by a corrupt judge to dilute public criticism.
Larry Kurina was once paroled for the double murder he committed in 1976, while a minor. But since his parole was violated in 1976 following an arrest for possessing stolen tools, the Illinois Prison Review Board has denied Kurina a second chance. Thursday the outcome was no different.
The Illinois House of Representatives is considering a bill that would give young offenders the opportunity for parole. Despite earlier hopes of advocates, the bill would give the decision to the Prisoner Review Board, an agency whose decisions, an Injustice Watch review found, are often inconsistent and arbitrary.
A state board uses an arbitrary and opaque process to decide whether prisoners convicted of committing violent crimes decades ago should be released, an Injustice Watch review has found. The process is wracked by subjectivity, and that problem is not confined to Illinois.
In 1993, Larry Kurina was paroled by the Illinois Prisoner Review Board after serving roughly 17 years for murder. After pleading guilty to a low-level felony in 2005, he has been back in custody since.
After all but giving up hope of release by the agency tasked with considering their parole, two inmates are searching for other ways out of prison.